A free conference on disabilities that promised everything “from Soup to Nuts” was such a hit that it will become a yearly event.
The conference, hosted by River of Life Christian Center in Riverview, featured conferences on everything from depression to caretaker burnout at the one-day event last month and drew more than 150 attendees, many from the Sun City Center area.
The opening remarks by County Commissioner Al Higginbotham were particularly well received, said Tammy Turner, who organized the conference with her husband Tim. Tammy said, “Everyone who heard him was really inspired.”
Tammy said the success of the conference proved there is a thirst for more information.
“Just about everyone who attended found something of interest to them,” Tammy said. Organizers also live-streamed some of the session online, “so we can’t be sure how many people watched online. That made it possible for some of the people in our church and others to be able to watch from their homes,” she said. Several sessions were also put on YouTube for future viewing.
The Turners are co-directors of HisAbility, a disability ministry at River of Life. They have been involved in disability issues across Florida for 18 years. They have also been regular attendees at a major disability conference held annually in Orlando that draws 8,000 to 9,000 people.
The conference sessions covered:
• Guardianship
• The Steps in Early Steps: USF Bay Area Early Steps Program
• Vocational Rehabilitation — Your Winning Ticket: Making Work Pay — Understanding Vocational Rehabilitation, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid
• Aging
• Depression
• Special-Needs Trusts
• Child Find
• Disaster Preparedness
• Inclusion
• Caretaker Burnout
• Turning 18, Guardianship and other options
• Covering Florida: Getting Consumers Enrolled in the Health Insurance Marketplace
• IEPs
• Is Disability in Your Diversity Toolbox?
Attendees all gave the conference a thumbs-up, Tammy said. “Everyone I talked to said it was a great conference; that it offered something for everybody.”
Despite the success, the Turners are already working on making tweaks for next year’s event. “Some areas we thought might be really important turned out not to be so important to the community,” she said. “Perhaps some of the sessions could have been combined. Some sessions were sparsely attended and we saw how maybe we could combine some of those to make them more productive.”
As for organization and logistics, Tammy felt the event was a great success. “I just felt maybe we could have scaled it back and still accomplished our goal.”
Turner hopes those who attended the conference came away with a greater understanding of disability-related issues.
“Our hope and goal is to educate, inform and empower people with disabilities and their families and give them hope,” she said. “We also want to give people an opportunity to network.”
“I think some people who attended changed their ideas about what disability was about. They were surprised that some of the information applied to them or their family members. It was interesting to see people coming in who said ‘I don’t know anything about disabilities’ or ‘Disabilities don’t impact me’ and they realized yes, it does.
“The one thing that really surprised me was that we asked people where they heard about the conference, and we found we had a lot of people from the Sun City Center area who said they got the information from the Sun City Center newspaper. I thought it was kind of funny because Ruskin is a bigger area but there still seemed to be a lot of people from the Sun City area who were looking at guardianships, special trusts and caregiver issues.”
The Turners are already planning a ministry meeting in coming weeks to plan their next steps.
For more information, call 813-677-4453.