October - December 2006

Greetings! I hope you all are enjoying this autumn. It is my most favorite season. I love breathing brisk winds, watching leaves turn into colors, and walking in fallen leaves.

More than four months have passed since the AADB national conference was held at Towson University this past June. The time flies by. It took me a while to recover from that. I hope you all recovered, too.

On behalf of AADB, I want to thank our conference sponsors yet again: Jill Sprinkle, Maryland Relay, Deaf Independent Living Association, Sorenson, and Visual Language Interpreting.

I also want to give Boundless Communications, LLC a big THANK YOU! for taking the lead in becoming a Silver sponsor for our next conference. Sponsors like Boundless Communications, LLC are a huge help for AADB in planning successful conferences for deaf-blind participants. We look forward to getting more sponsors involved in the future.

In addition, I want to again thank all the board members, AADB staff, our national chairs, SSPs, interpreters, volunteers, local workers, and in-kind sponsors who made this conference a success. We could not have done it without you!

Now, we came back to a normal routine when the AADB Finance Committee meeting took place at the AADB Office on the weekend of September 8-9.

Dr. Jeffrey Bohrman (chair), Jill Gaus, Dorothy Walt and I (an ex-officio member) took part in the meeting. We reviewed and discussed the 2006 conference budget, conference policies and procedures, and future conference budgets. And, we spent a considerable amount of time reviewing, discussing and revising each line item of the fiscal 2007 budget. We are now confident that the board, which will meet in November, will approve the proposed fiscal 2007 budget.

On September 14, I presented to the members of the Northern Virginia Association of the Deaf, where I talked mostly about AADB. Around 135 people attended, and they kept asking me questions for more than one hour after I finished the lecture.

And then, while I was in Columbus, Ohio on September 21-24, I gave three lectures at the Ohio School for the Deaf and visited deaf-blind people at the Columbus Colony Elderly Care (CCEC). It was a very interesting experience for me to meet and talk with deaf-blind people there. Exactly 25 deaf-blind people are now residing at CCEC. I also talked to them about AADB.

On September 29 - October 1, I ran the AADB Executive Committee meeting. Lee Clark (Vice President), Marilyn Trader (Secretary) and Dr. Jeffrey Bohrman (Treasurer) were involved in the meeting. We would like to share with you several highlights:

* The 2006 AADB conference: We evaluated a wide variety of conference events, such as registration, housing, transportation, and SSP/interpreters. We also planned strategies for improving them for our next conference.

* The 2008 AADB conference: We reviewed and discussed possible conference sites and other issues for our next conference. We will bring these issues to the full board for consideration in November.

* The Council of Representatives: We discussed how to involve more deaf-blind people with AADB. One idea is to establish a council of representatives. This idea comes from the National Association of the Deaf's Council of Representatives (COR). The COR consists of two delegates from each state association of the deaf and meets during every NAD conference. The main purpose of such a council is to identify, select and submit to NAD's Board of Directors a list of top priorities for the NAD office to act on. So, we thought AADB should have one. We will continue to investigate ways for involving more deaf-blind people with our organization. One option is to select one deaf-blind delegate from each state or region, or from each local/state association of the deaf-blind. We will possibly develop a proposed delegate manual to assist us with this project. We will keep you posted on our progress.

The AADB Board of Directors met during the weekend of November 10-12. We worked together on many significant issues, and I will report on the Board of Directors meeting in the next issue of the DBA.

Have a wonderful autumn, and best wishes for the holidays ahead.