March 2, 2011 Lobby Day News - Rally Theme & Awards Ceremony

Published 02-22-2011

This Year’s Rally Theme – “Communication: A Basic Need and a Civil Right”

Meet with legislators and tell them why the following services are important to you! Let legislators know why the following programs that are at risk for big cuts or elimination are important to you:

• Support Service Providers and Interveners for DeafBlind
• Parent Guides that provide unbiased information to parents of babies newly identified with hearing loss
• Deaf Mentors: Provides parents of babies newly identified with hearing loss with the opportunity to learn from a Deaf mentor who has gone through early childhood training and teaches sign language in their home.
• Services provided by the Deaf and Hard of Hearing Services Division
• Minnesota Employment Center for Deaf and Hard of Hearing
• Interpreters for VECTOR transition program for Deaf and Hard of Hearing youth
• Minnesota State Academy for the Deaf funding and pilot program
• Money to support accessible state software, hardware and websites, including captioning of videos and videos in ASL

Awards Ceremony during the Noon Rally – Watch advocates and key allies get awards!

• Life Time Achievement Awards: Alan Parnes for his lifelong commitment to advocacy in employment and to Marian Hausladen for her advocacy in education.
• Grass Roots Advocacy Award: Metro Deaf School for their successful advocacy for legislation that saved their school in 2010.
• Citizen Advocate Award: Sherri Rademacher for her ongoing advocacy with news stations and candidates for public office to follow federal and state captioning laws.
• Agency Partner Awards: Office of Enterprise Technology and Department of Administration for their excellent work in leading, adopting and implementing state technology accessibility standards. Accessibility Leadership Awards: Betsy Hayes, Rena Rogers, Colleen Wieck for their extraordinary work in implementing the law. Newly appointed Commissioners Spencer Cronk of Admin and Carolyn Parnell of OET will accept the awards. The Legislative Coordinating Commission, Senate Media Services and House Media Services for their implementation of live captioning of floor sessions and committee hearings.
• Accessible News Outlet Media Excellence: The Uptake was the only media outlet that covered candidates’ captioning of ads during the 2010 campaign. This resulted in more candidates complying with the state candidate captioning law. The Uptake also voluntarily captioned every gubernatorial debate online.
• Accessible NonProfit Captioning Excellence: The Minnesota Council of Nonprofits adopted a policy of captioning all of its online videos.
• Most Accessible Campaign Awards: Tom Emmer, Governor Mark Dayton, State Auditor Rebecca Otto, Secretary of State Mark Ritchie, Tom Horner, Congressman Tim Walz will all receive awards for captioning their campaign ads.
• Advocacy Through the Arts Award: Barbara Allen, Nancy Meyers and Anita Buel for their extraordinary film, “Signing On”. This film will change the way doctors treat patients and will empower people who are deaf to get the health care services they need in American Sign Language.
• Community Justice Award: Officer Chad Koch initiated programs within the St. Paul Police Department to provide education to officers and outreach to the Deaf community.