DAT

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DAT

San Francisco, United States
Team Contact: Morgan
Team Type: Youth Venture
Team Phase: Forming a Team

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About Us

We are the D.A.T. Girls! Also known as the Disability Awareness Girls. Our goal is to bring awareness to our community about the deaf and blind.

The D.A.T. Girls is a youth venture group of girls that want to help the deaf and blind in the bay area community. We want to bring awareness to people who are not deaf or blind and for them to see what it would be like if they were in that situation. We are all learning sign language and braille so we can communicate with the people who we want to help. We want the people that are in our own community to appreciate their senses and also for them to see a possiblity of interacting with someone who is in the deaf and blind community. We want to close the gap between those who can see/hear and those who can't.

Interests

Disabilities Awareness

Our Team is looking for help with…

ways that we can get our school involved with helping the blind and deaf in the bay area.

More about us...

How does your group impact your community?

Our team impacts our community because we want people to be aware of those who are visually and hearing impaired. We want people to reach out to those who are in this particular situation and to be able to see that you can communicate with these people even if they are different from you.

How many people have been impacted by your group?

Our team has impacted our school. We go to a very small school which consists of 250 people. We talked about disabilities at an assembly that was held on Holy Thursday. We talked about the beating of Jesus that took place when he was going to be crucified. We had our student body do an exercise where they closed their eyes, and they imagined themselves witnessing the whipping of Jesus. But as they were witnessing this horrific event, they suddenly went deaf, blind and mute and could not react to anything that was happening around them. People who were at the assembly told us that it was powerful for them to think about what it might be like to lose your senses.

Looking back we should have...

started recruiting members at the very beginning of the school year because we would have had a lot more by now.

Looking back we did a great job at...

finding resources for us to improve as a group such as our sign language and braille teacher, Sook Hee, and also searching for places to volunteer at like the Lighthouse for the Blind.

What we really enjoy about being young changemakers is...

that we can see how much we impact people. We love being able to help a deaf or blind person and to see how happy they are when we are simply taking a minute out of our day to make their life easier. We also enjoy taking sign language and braille classes by our teacher who happens deaf. The knowledge of sign language and braille has been an amazing experience, and we learn something new each lesson that we have!

What other youth networks are you involved in? What other websites do you belong to, other youth organizations, etc.?

The president of DAT, Fatima, is in a youth group for her church.

3 Month Survey

Describe your recent Venture activities. What have you accomplished since selection?

We have volunteered at a Deaf Social Event that was held at the Deaf Community Center. We served them food and tried to communicate with them through the sign language that we have learned. We are also planning to volunteer at the Lighthouse for the Blind where we have the opportunities to do personal services for the blind, be a camp counselor at a visually impaired camp, and even to be an announcer for the bingo games that they have there!

Have you faced any difficulties? Were you able to solve them? If so, how? If not, what would have been helpful to you?

The difficulties we have had is that our sign language and braille teacher is deaf. We have to communicate with her through a laptop. We type our questions that we have about what she is teaching us, and she responds by typing the answer. She has a hard time speaking because she has never heard herself talk before. This difficulty has forced us to practice our sign language even more because of the limited amount of communication due to her lack of hearing.

What upcoming plans do you have for your Venture? How will your Venture continue to benefit the community?

Our upcoming plans are to have a Disability Awareness week at our school where we will focus on those who are deaf or blind. We want to speak over the P.A. system at our school and read over statistics about the deaf and blind to the students. We want to have posters around the school that represent the visual and hearing impaired and possibly charts and graphs that shows data. Our venture will continue to benefit the community by finding ways where we can speak to people about those who are different from us and influence them to reach out to those who they have a hard time relating to. We want to close the gap that is between the visual/hearing impaired and those who are not.

Describe your relationship with your Ally and your Partner Organization.

Our Ally is Ms. Cerruti. She is our English teacher at our school. She is very understanding of our goals as a team and wants to help us. She even arranged for the Holy Thursday exercise that we had for the student body about being disabled and witnessing Jesus' crucifixion.

Have you taken advantage of Youth Venture materials? Tell us your thoughts and ideas to make Youth Venture stronger!

We have taken advantage of youth venture materials. I think that you guys can make Youth Venture stronger by offering it as a college credit organization. I think a lot more teenagers would be interested in being a part of youth venture if it helped them get into college somehow.

What could Youth Venture do to help you even more?

Youth Venture can continue to give us feedback on how much they think our venture is an impact on the community and what other steps we need to take to make our group sustain.

How would you like to continue your involvement with Youth Venture?

Help recruit potential Venturers

Become a YV ambassador (represent YV at events, in the media, etc.)

Other ways you might continue your involvement with Youth Venture?

Even when I graduate from high school, I can still be involved with Youth Venture. There is a Venture Organization for young adults, and I can be apart of that. I am hoping that there will be leaders at my school when I leave who will help with being in charge of the DAT Girls. I could still visit my school and talk with the people in DAT about what they should do to keep this group active in our school and in the community as well.

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