By Zoey Giesberg, MSW Everyone in the FACT Family knows Linda Andron-Ostrow well. Without Linda, FACT wouldn’t exist as a hub for autistic people, families, professionals, self-advocates, and other disabled people for services, support, and more. Many of us have had Linda as an active and nurturing part of our lives for almost two decades. And while it’ll be hard to not see her part of FACT’s everyday life, she leaves a wonderful legacy of love, care, and empowerment to…
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A blog of personal opinion from Zoey Giesberg: The month of April has always held a special place in my heart. Spring is fresh in the air, it’s still early in the year but not too much so, and the weather is pretty cooperative in the not-too-hot-but-not-too-cold way. But it’s most likely due to the fact that it’s my birth month, as I was born on the eighth. In fact, April holds a lot of birthdays of people I love…
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By Zoey Giesberg, MSW If one of the biggest characteristics of being human is having many emotional states, there seems to be this weird idea that autistic people have an innate inability to understand or express emotions. This would in turn lead autistic people to become hard to connect to, let alone engage with other people. It’s kinda like Spock from the original Star Trek series – a purely logical creature who has to constantly ask his crew-mates why human…
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As 2016 came to a close, GAP celebrated the holiday season with a bang! Check out some pictures of their festivities!
By Zoey Giesberg, MSW I have almost 13,000 songs in my iTunes library. You read that right. 13,000 songs. You’re probably wondering who could possibly listen to that much music in one lifetime. Well, I can. Or at least I can listen to my playlist of favorite songs over and over again. That playlist has over 2,000 songs and grows by the day. Put it on shuffle and I could always hear something different over five and a half days…
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By Zoey Giesberg, MSW At last month’s FACTx conference, I gave a presentation on California’s Self Determination law. It’s a complicated law that revolves a regional center’s client ability to control what services they get, and more information on it can be found here. In my presentation, I was joined by two students in the GAP program to talk about our personal experiences and what the law would mean to us. But while I was trying to relay information on…
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GAP has always been a place of fun, and this Halloween they threw some scares and spooks into their annual Halloween bash! Check out the pictures below of fun and mayhem!
Thanks to all who attended in person or online. If you would like to view some of the presentations, contact [email protected] This was the full line-up: October 14, 2016 8 to 9 AM Check In/Welcome: Marc Haupert, Interim Executive Director 9: 00 AM Linda Andron-Ostrow: Opening Remarks 9:45 AM Susan Schmidt Lackner, MD: “Biomedical Interventions: Healing the Whole Child” 10: 20 AM 15 MINUTE BREAK 10:35 AM Erika…
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“Rather than being better than someone else, try and be better than yourself.” I am a full-time student at Santa Monica College, so I try and focus on my studies. In my free time I like to volunteer at the Meals on Wheels program, I feel like it gives my life some meaning, and after doing it I feel like I’ve really accomplished something. I am trying my hardest to focus on school, and to learn how to make digital art.…
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By Zoey Giesberg, MSW I recently wrote about disability in the media (or rather how disability is portrayed as a tragedy by media). In it, I said that stories about disability are mostly about how a disabled person affects others, and how all involved parties “struggle” with it and have to “persevere”. And I wrote that the remedy to this is to tell stories from the disabled character’s perspective and promote it like whoa. I honestly didn’t think that I’d…
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