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Florida SAND Fellowship Year One: A Review of How My Advocacy Has Benefited From My Fellowship

Hello again everyone. I hope everyone enjoyed yesterday’s blog on adaptive cooking and cookware. As my fellowship is coming to the end of the contract for my first year tomorrow, I felt it would be appropriate to give a nod to not only Florida SAND but my colleagues and the staff who trained us throughout this past year to thank them for helping my passion for advocacy grow.  I came into this fellowship at a weird time in my life. Before the fellowship, I had worked for Florida SAND as a per diem writer for their blog FSA Central. While this work kept the flame for disability advocacy alive and on life support, when I was presented with the opportunity to be a fellow, I immediately jumped at it. Thank you to Kelli Munn for the opportunity.  I would not be where I am today without your faith in me. However, my fellowship wasn’t as smooth of a journey as I had hoped.  About a month into the fellowship, I began to take it for granted. I had an ego bigger than the state of Fl...

Unlikely Advocates: How One of America's Most Influential Families Became Some of the Disability Community's Strongest Allies

Recently I finished a book entitled “Rosemary: The Hidden Kennedy Daughter” by Kate Clifford Larson. I was turned on to the book by my girlfriend Samantha Lebron. She knows that I love history, especially political history. When I first began reading the book, I wasn’t sure what to expect. The Kennedy family has been written about extensively. I thought this would be another look at the Kennedy family through the lens of politics, and, to some extent, it was, but it was much more than just a book about politics. As I got deeper into the book, I realized the book was about something more. It was on a deeper level about the history of the treatment of people with disabilities in the United States. Although Rosemary Kennedy was born to one of the most affluent families of the 20th century, unbeknownst to her she would face prejudices not only from the outside world but even from some members of her own family. Without recounting the whole book which I highly recommend you should read, I w...