Family, Adult & Child Therapies
It is a true pleasure and honor to be greeting you as the new Interim Executive Director of FACT. Of course first off I want to acknowledge Linda Andron for her fierce determination and dedication to FACT and to the wide diversity of clients and families it serves. We held a thank you dinner for her at the end of June and the outpouring of thanks and praise from current and former staff, clients, colleagues and families was remarkable. Her…
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Powered by Eventbrite Note: come back regularly to learn about new performances, events and opportunities that will be part of this fun day! Due to overwhelming popular demand, The Strindberg Laboratory’s “Jails to Jobs Program” and FACT are proud to bring back their very popular show, Daroca’s Curious Journey, a fantastical play about a circus troupe’s madness when they arrive at a magical bus stop. The play is 30 minutes of original stories, dances, songs and plenty of mayhem! The…
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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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William Shakespeare once wrote “parting is such sweet sorrow”, and we at FACT know this feeling well. Our wonderful President Karen Heads is stepping down after many years of wonderful service to our community. She and our other outgoing board members will continue to serve in FACT’s leadership on committees, and so wish them the best of luck, and welcome our newest board members with open arms! Click below the cut for more pictures of our 2016 board dinner!
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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By Linda Andron-Ostrow, Director of Programs and Services I would like to thank everyone who read our last email blast announcing my position change, and mostly to the many people who responded. It really highlights the fact that at FACT, we are a family. To clarify, I am not retiring but rather transitioning. Transition has many meanings to many people, but what all transitions have in common is change—ideally a change that is gradual and keeps supports in place. The word succession contains…
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ARCA Statement on AB 1715 – Advocacy Needed! On January 26, 2016, California State Assembly member Chris Holden (Pasadena) introduced AB 1715 to the Assembly. AB 1715 was created, in his words, “to protect autistic children, as well as others who can benefit from behavior analytic services, from those who falsely claim that they are qualified to practice behavior analysis.” This bill would require legal documentation of training and competence in applied behavioral analysis therapy (ABA) for practitioners and allow California…
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Video via NAMI.org One of the biggest concerns for people with disabilities is having and managing money. The costs of managing a disability are staggering and can prevent the disabled from working. While many disabled people rely on Social Security (particularly Supplemental Security Income/SSI or Social Security Disability SSI/SSDI) as a source of income, current policies prevent them from saving more than $2,000 in cash savings and more to qualify for these benefits. In practice, this forces the disabled to live below the poverty line…
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By Zoey Giesberg, MSW I’m not a big fan of sappy romantic dramas. While I will admit to being among the many who sobbed at the end “The Notebook” when I first saw it as a teenager, stories of people falling in love while something “greater” than themselves try to keep them from being together just feels tired to me. There aren’t many ways to make this Romeo and Juliet narrative new and innovative, and the onslaught of these films…
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By Zoey Giesberg, MSW Earlier this week, one of my favorite actors Kristen Bell revealed that she suffers from depression and anxiety. In an interview with “Off Camera with Sam Jones”, she talked about how her mother told her at a young age about a hereditary serotonin imbalance in her family and taking medication to help ease the hormone. You can watch the interview here: It was shocking to me to hear this from Bell. She’s known for being a…
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