ND Assistive的动态

Transcript

Hi, my name is Mike Scioscia. I'm the Executive Director at North Dakota Assistive. We help connect people with assistive technology. So assistive technology is any device that can help people overcome pretty much any limitation that they have. Our role as a nonprofit, we don't make a profit from anything anybody takes out of this place. We also then aren't tied to a specific item or a specific product. We are going to be the impartial jury. On helping people kind of make this selection hello I'm Jeannie Crowe with North Dakota assistive I'm the assistant executive director anything can be assistive technology and as long as it's helping the person with the disability do the things they want to do but we want people to to know about assistive technology and find it easily there's about 195,000 people with disabilities in North Dakota it's about one in four so you can see we have a long way to go when someone comes into one of our. Demonstration centers or gives us a call about anything. The first thing we want to know is what they're trying to do that they might need a little help with. And so we do diagnose from the very beginning about what are your goals and then we will help them navigate this assistive technology world to find the right tools to meet their needs. We also have the ability, which is super cool, to allow people to check them out. So like a library, people can check out these devices and see if they're going to work. In those circumstances at home, and the consultants lead all of that process when they're working with an individual. At one point we were only for individuals. And so we've grown quite a bit and we're on our way to 15 individuals pretty soon here. And we used to serve barely 100 people a year, and now we're up to 3000. The problem is, is that nobody knows what they're missing. And because they don't know about it and they don't know about it before they need it. Our goals, it's my personal goal to help as many people as we can. And and continue to expand our work here so that we can reach even more people. For me, I think one of the biggest disasters that happen in life is that you are stuck, that there's no choice. And for me, Assistive devices is really about giving people choices. So when we start thinking about things like the Bush Prize and helping other people create energy around what we're trying to do, I think our site is on how do we reach more people in more ways. So they have more choices. No matter where you live, the responsibility of us helping people know that stuff before they get to that point is big. And I'm super excited about what this might be able to help us do in that space. You know, I think it's going to be a really big impact in the area of awareness, that Bush Prize. It'll allow us to do things that we've been wanting to do for a very long time. It's going to allow us to build up our occupational therapist to be able to do more assessments and then hopefully. Little that weight list down and and be able to serve people in a more timely fashion. I'm hoping someday in the future that people will just know where to go when they are having issues being independent or being safe at home. They'll just know to call us. I'm hoping that this Bush Prize will elevate us to that point. The meaning behind something like this is validation for what you do for someone to recognize the impact that we truly. Have it's beyond belief, like we're overjoyed that someone else kind of saw the impact that we have and it's a blast. I really want to thank the Bush Foundation for helping us realize our own potential. It's really exciting and I know it's going to lead to even more great things. Thank you to the Bush Foundation and anybody who cared enough for 5 minutes to pay attention to what we're doing. I mean, that really is what matters, people knowing. About assistive technology, people getting fired up about it and understanding the impact it can have on lives that's as big as anything else. And the investment in time, too, that Bush puts into getting this right and getting to know who we are along the way? That's special stuff.