QuEST Celebrates 30th Anniversary Saturday Jun 11 Blended In-person and Virtual, with both art and readable text

 

"Congratulations, You Have Been Chosen To Be A MENTOR In The AFB (American Foundation for the Blind) Blind Leaders Development Program (and we will be booking you a trip to Louisville KY for August dates)"

The Who? What Now? And what is this doing in the QuEST 30th Anniversary Announcement?

Look where one term on QuEST committee will get you?

First, the event announcement, in both pretty picture and screen reader readable text form

Foliage in one corner
long image of text invitation and
watering can full of flowers at the bottom.
Text in image not readable by screen readers
and may differ from text below.

Saturday, June 11 — QuEST 30th Anniversary and Alum Day!

At University Friends Meeting, 4001 9th Ave NE, Seattle

9:30 am — welcome, coffee and snacks provided

10-noon — outdoor gardening service project

12 noon — potluck, bring a dish to share

 

Hybrid: at University Friends Meeting and online via Zoom (https://zoom.us/j/2065476449)

1:30-3:30 pm — Meeting for Worship for Celebration with slideshow, speakers, and sharing

 No RSVP needed. Join us for any part of the day. Partners, friends, and children welcome. Masks recommended for in-person indoor meeting. Contact director@quest-seattle.org with any questions or inclusion needs.

RantWoman really is curious about where people have come over the past 30 years.

RantWoman also thinks a term on QuEST committee qualifies her as a QuEST alum. RantWoman can say nothing intelligent about how this experience looked to others. RantWoman MEANS IT, though, about what this committee service meant at a time when RantWoman was trying to keep her feet on the ground, deal with life-changing medical events, and hit her stride about new normal. So in case anyone else is wavering about saying anything about a personal challenge, RantWoman provides the following helpful tour of several themes that sometimes show up at parties along with all the festivities.

Warning: the below involves both points to celebrate and MANY threads of "Do Better Next Time." RantWoman for this event thinks the celebration is enough. RantWoman also invites readers to celebrate RantWoman's commitment no longer just to step back every time a "Do Better Next Time" issue comes up. Actually solving Do Better Next Time challenges is a story for another party though.

RantWoman, are you EVER satisfied? 

Keep reading. Just because, dear readers, maybe you have done the best you could and maybe you think your efforts are supposed to be satisfactory does not, sorry to say, mean the results actually ARE satisfactory.

Because this is Planet RantWoman, please also note

QuEST Equity Statement

RantWoman likes several things about this statement:

--It exists! RantWoman does not remember the existence of anything analogous long ago when RantWoman served on QuEST committee while struggling to deal with midlife vision loss. RantWoman remembers saying very little about her personal struggles at this time. RantWoman remembers doing A LOT of what is called covering or minimizing. 

--The statement includes disability in the list of characteristics QuEST aspires not to discriminate about. RantWoman appreciates that the statement is honest about physical characteristics of the house and just needs to let that be. RantWoman also knows of a story in this realm that is not hers to tell even though it matters to RantWoman that the story exists. 

--The policy mentions continuous learning, and promises to ask potential agencies how they are prepared to handle reasonable accommodations requests. 

--RantWoman appreciates that the most recent coordinator was able to attend one training; RantWoman would love it if there were also mention of Fellows perhaps devoting one of their QuEST time sessions to something to do with disability inclusion, disability justice, or even some wonky disability specific policy issue.


Anniversaries are times of reflection and RantWoman finds it easy to be generous about questions to reflect on.

--How do you think things have gone as far as operationalizing that concern?

 --Do you think fellows feel safe disclosing either obvious or hidden disabilities?

--Do you have any sense of whether there might be covering going on?

--Are people reasonably confident that reasonable accommodations requests can be handled without making people's heads explode?

--Do Fellows have the opportunity during QuEST time or otherwise to hear the voices of lived experiences of people with disabilities?

--Do Fellows have resources to draw on if, as seems extremely likely, they encounter questions of disability and ableism during their work?

--If one of the fellows suffered a life-changing medical event during their service, would the program be able to walk with the fellow during recovery and vocational rehabilitation?

In the past when RantWoman has come to the QuEST final report, RantWoman has been the ONLY person asking anything about disability. RantWoman tends to ask questions like

--Have your agencies provided any training about anything to do with disability? Some have; some haven't.

--Do you have a sense of what percentage of the people your agency serves identify as having a disability?

RantWoman tries to ask open no-pressure questions; Quaker spaces are by far not the only places where people tend not to figure out important issues without someone being faithful about the need to keep talking about them.

In case anyone needs any more topics RantWoman can go on at length about RantWoman has just spent her afternoon:

--Noting news updates about a transit agency board in another city who want to propose budget cuts that would dramatically impact all the people with disabilities who rely on transit to get around.

--Sorting out a tangle of blind person housing issues involving a senior who has aged into blindness and now needs skills of blindness to maintain housing

--Coping with a nasty software accessibility issue as an application reviewer on a grants management platform

--Reassuring the person staffing the grant evaluation process and another person in the process that RantWoman is happy to speak in more detail to the vendor who perpetrated this software inaccessibility after this cycle of the grants process is done

--Bucking advice from a grant writer RantWoman has worked with in the past: Previous Grant Writer kep telling RantWoman that there wasn't space to write certain kinds of disability related detail and the reviewers would be mystified. Some of this year's reviewers absolutely would be mystified but other parts of the grants review process are doing what looks like a decent job of including multiple voices in the review process. And part of that is getting kinked because of RantWoman's need to deal with software inaccessibility. 

   This year space constraints are different and RantWoman finds herself writing comments encouraging the applicants who do specifically talk about serving people with disabilities to maybe say more in detail about how they will use things built into the technology they want to buy to meet the needs of the populations they serve

--Writing reviewer comments to the applicants who don't specifically mention serving people with disabilities to think about whether people with disabilities are probably walking in their door whether they realize it or not.

RantWoman is happy to go on at length--and won't be able to tell if she is boing you.

RantWoman also wonders what other "do better next time" thoughts Friends might have.

With all of that to chew on Congratulations to QuEST