Editor's Column
by
Tim Benjamin
With
all the holiday festivities taking place and the new year right
around the corner, it’s
natural to think about endings and beginnings. Looking around the
Minnesota disability community, there are some great things to recall
about 2006, and many that hold promise for 2007.
In last month’s issue, we featured many of the notable accomplishments
in the community, celebrating along with the Minnesota State Council
on Disability, the Metropolitan Center for Independent Living, and
Access Press’s Charlie Smith award recipient, John Smith. They
all contributed to making this community stronger in 2006.
This month we feature Courage
Center, and the fabulous job Jan
Malcolm, Executive Director, has done since coming on board. With
Ms. Malcolm’s experience in healthcare administration, she
has picked up the Courage Center ball and run with it for a little
over a year now, demonstrating leadership, confidence and true
professionalism. She has been stabilizing and reinventing old programs.
The pain clinic is a good example of one of the reinvented programs
that Courage Center now offers. When Ms. Malcolm first took the
job at Courage Center, I asked her if in one year I would be able
to go through the facility and ask the staff if they had met her;
she hesitated for a moment and said that she would “let the
program directors and department directors handle the day-by-day
contact with their staff,” but that she hoped she would have
an opportunity to meet many of them. In the last three or four
months, I have not run into an employee of Courage Center that
hasn’t been introduced to her or at least been recognized
with a nod, a smile and “you’re doing a good job” from
her. Speaking for the paper, I can say that since our first meeting,
Ms. Malcolm has always made herself available to Access Press and
has been very gracious about offering help.
The Interact
Center for Visual and Performing Arts has also been doing a lot of reinventing
recently, with a new version of the play, The Worldwide Church
of the Handicapped. The production has turned out to be as wonderful—and
as hard to get tickets for—as
the first version. Beyond reinvention, in the last year, Interact
has been in collaboration with the Australian theater company, Tutti
Ensemble, which, like Interact, features original theater that involves
artists with and without disabilities. The two groups are getting
together in February to debut their newest work, Northern Lights,
Southern Cross: Tales from the Other Side of the World. The new play
takes a deep look at, and challenges society’s views about,
people’s abilities and disabilities—through music, storytelling,
puppetry and much more. I’m very excited about the debut of
Northern Lights, Southern Cross here in Minnesota. The collaboration
between the two theater groups had the support of the U.S. National
Endowment for the Arts and the Australia Council for the Arts. If
you’re an Interact fan and have a few extra dollars to donate,
it would be a wonderful thing to say that you, too, have been involved
in supporting this creative endeavor across two hemispheres.
Here at Access Press,
we deeply appreciate everyone who has supported the paper this
year. The monthly endeavor putting out a statewide newspaper has
been an ongoing challenge since Charlie Smith first started out
in 1990, and in recent years the challenges have become increasingly
demanding. The paper began at a time before the Worldwide Web and
global media conglomerations. Right now, newspapers all over the
country—from the New York Times to community papers like
ours—are finding it hard to survive. Our advertisers have increasingly
sophisticated options for reaching their customers in print and online.
I’m grateful to all of you who reach out to the disability
community through Access Press, offering your products, services
and information.
Since the beginning, and throughout 2006, Access Press
has also received the support of hundreds of volunteer writers and
other contributors who make it a fine source of information and debate
in our community. The paper receives the unwavering dedication of
its board of directors. Many friends and individual financial donors
and philanthropic partners provide not only financial support but
show their trust in me to use their financial support in a responsible
way. For that I thank you all. ![]()
Have a great December!
