October 15, 2022 - The Vision Fair, Fox Family Foundation
The Robert A. Fox Family Foundation, a.k.a. the Fox Family Foundation's mission is to break the link between poverty and vision loss. It was a mission personally important to our founder, Bob Fox.
I had been hired by his daughter, Lee, the President, originally as her Executive Assistant, but gradually shifted into Program Officer, and, by October 2022, also the Event Producer role.
It was interesting making the jump from the traditional nonprofit, LEAP, to the foundation side. I never knew disability advocacy would become one of my things, but the work was important and completely remote during COVID (and remains so).
(For the longest time, Lee was remodeling one of the spaces at her house to be our office. About five months later, we masked up, opened windows and doors and worked together in person. This was the nicest office I had ever worked in. She casually mentioned that when her kids came home it could double as their bedroom. We worked together in that office a total of 2.5 days since 2020. Sadness.)
When you work from the foundation side, you really believe you are empowering other organizations who work tirelessly on disability rights, workforce development, assistive tech, and early intervention amongst other things. But what I learned is that you know nothing of working with people disabilities, Jon Snow.
One of our grantees had a Leadership training program funded by the MacArthur Foundation for people with disabilities. The model was to offer job skills training for three months and then to place the participants into externships for three months with their salaries being paid through our grant.
Sometime after their second cohort, I wanted to get to know them, so I chatted with each one individually, only to find out that 6-of-9 of them did not have externships and were just sitting around waiting for an offer.
I made the proposal to our Board that they should come fulfill their externship at Fox Family. We were working on a curriculum pilot for a program called InVisions, teaching kids about universal access and entrepreneurship with a lens on inclusion and designing for all. (This is our big push in 2024-2025 at Fox). The Fellows would serve as mentors for this program and ended up being the piece the participants loved most... getting to work side by side with people with disabilities as they designed for inclusion.
The fellows would also help me produce the first annual Fox Family Foundation Vision Fair.
I won't lie. It was a ton of work. As much as you wanted to say the event was a triumph, there were a lot of lessons to learn in the ramp up. (Ultimately, everyone still considers it a success.)
The concept was to offer a day of free visions screenings with booths featuring disability services and educational programming. We'd also have speakers across the day. Five visions screeners were there, with VSP handing out certificates for free vision screenings and glasses for those who couldn't be seen. Tzu Chi made glasses on site. VSP also donated 2000 frames. Grantees UCLA Mobile Eye Clinic, the Southern California Eye Institute, and Vision to Learn participated. And my future eye surgeon, Dr. Tawansy of Raymond Renaissance Eye Clinic also screened.
The skies even cleared up from raining over night just at the start of the event.
Click below for the video of the vision fair. The visual description is in the description on YouTube.
Credit: we publicized very well. Problem: we had too many parents bring their kids for screenings, and while we tried to get VSP certificates to everyone who showed up, there just weren't enough.
Though the screeners reported higher screenings and exams than at any other health fair, we still weren't able to cover everyone.
Another amusing thing that happened is that we were co-sponsored by City Council District 14. Kevin DeLeon's office had provided funds for many of tents. Several days before the fair, the Councilman was caught up in a scandal where he and two others were secretly recorded discussing gerrymandering around racial divisions to boost the favors of their districts. Yeah, that was a problem. We had to scrub his logo from much of the already printed material.
A reporter from ABC showed up ostensibly to report on the fair, but after I didn't want to comment and pointed him to the fellows for an interview, he left, disappointed DeLeon didn't show.
Finally, something I learned as an advocate. Although I was supervising the Fellowship, by the time the Vision Fair entered its planning phase , my role really shifted to Event Producer. Without giving details of the story, I learned that it is really important to ask "what other accommodations might you need to succeed in this" instead of assuming the worst.
I broke for this commercial message because disability advocacy is something that is also important to me.
Also, thank you Austin, for running the session of the day with Brad Dutz.
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