To watch these videos you need to have RealPlayer on your computer. Dowload RealPlayer (It's Free.)
"Our Voice Counts" is our newest video! It's about 14 minutes long.
Watch "Our Voice Counts."
How Self-Advocacy Changed Our Lives
Watch Video "How Self-Advocacy Has Changed Our Lives"
You can follow along with the words the self-advocates are saying by reading the text below on this page. (To see the video and the text at the same time, you may need to click in the upper right corner of the RealPlayer window to make it smaller.)
To
return to this page after watching a video, click on the button with the
back arrow at the top left of the page.
Text Version of "How Self-Advocacy..." Video
Note: Darcus
Nims is Founder and Vice-President of Self-Advocates of Indiana and
Betty Williams is President of Self-Advocates of Indiana.
Darcus: W hen I went to work for the first time for the workshop, they called my mom up and said they had to do something about me because I was so quiet and shy. I wouldn't talk to other people or do anything. I just kept to myself and all. Then self-advocates just, I started going to the meetings and stuff and self-advocacy just opened it up and now they try to find to shut me up because I talk too much.
I'm teaching other people to come out of their shyness. That's what self-advocacy is about, opening yourself up, coming out of your shyness. Start learning to do things for yourself and stop letting other people do all the talking for you. Start learning to do your own talking. Start learning to do things that you wanted to do except other people telling you can do or you can not do this.
Betty: To me, being a self-advocate is hopefully learning how to hope and dream about a better tomorrow. I'm trying to learn to teach them how to do new things, and how to grow all the time, and how to become the best advocates for their lives because they are the experts in their lives. They are the ones that know what they want for their lives. But if people never tell them that they have the right to dream about what it is they want for their lives, they don't know. A lot of times they don't know they have the right to speak up for what they want for their lives.
I just never thought that I'd be doing any of the things that I'm doing right now because I never saw anything for my life. As a kid growing up, I just knew about all the struggles I had and I never thought that I'd become involved in a movement like the self-advocates movement, that made a difference in our lives, that makes a difference in people's lives like this. We're learning more and more about how to advocate for ourselves and speak up for what we want. I believe that we should have the same equal rights as other people in our community, as far as getting jobs, living where we want to, and being able to move around in our community the same as anybody else.
