CT Audubon Society, 10 Area Institutions Discuss Accessibility

NORWALK, CT — The Connecticut Audubon Society is among 11 Fairfield County institutions who have teamed up to make visits easier for guests with special needs. On Tuesday, representatives from each institution gathered at the Maritime Aquarium for a meeting aimed at gathering information, brainstorming ideas and giving thoughts on a planned portal for local families and service providers.

Tom Naiman, Director of Education and Volunteers for the aquarium, said the initiative was spearheaded by two staff members with family members who have special needs. (To sign up for Fairfield breaking news alerts and more, click here.)

"This got started because we became aware there were some institutions around the country who were doing events for people with special needs," Naiman said. "By special needs, we mean intellectual, cognitive and physical differences. Even though many of us had been in this field for a long time, we hadn’t really had any training around these issues; we hadn’t thought deeply about what we can do to make the aquarium more hospitable."

This unprecedented program, which is called "Accessibility for All," is coordinated by the aquarium through a $25,000 grant from Fairfield County’s Community Foundation. In addition to the individual organizational efforts, the group is also collaborating on a new website that will provide a "one-stop shop" for information about how each attraction accommodates guests with special needs.

"It became clear to us as we were thinking about these issues that there was no easy way for a family who has members who have special needs or a group that serves people with special needs to get information on what all of our institutions are doing," Naiman said. "All of our websites are different, which meant that if you have a child who has special needs, you have to go to every individual website and kind of hunt and peck around. We thought about how powerful it would be if these 11 institutions could provide a portal that presented all of this information and links to the proper places on these websites. It became a sort of one-stop shop and an entry that you, as a parent or as a service provider, could go to."

According to Naiman, the website is planned to launch in early April and will feature a collaborative calendar for events that are hospitable for people with special needs.

The aquarium currently offers regular sensory-friendly mornings, during which the lights in the facility are turned down, IMAX movies are shown at lower volumes and discounts are offered to groups with special needs.

"It just seemed like a very powerful way of making it easier for parents and service providers who have all sorts of challenges already," Naiman said.

The 11 institutions present at Tuesday's meeting included:

• The Maritime Aquarium of Norwalk
• Stepping Stones Museum for Children of Norwalk
• Earthplace of Westport
• The Stamford Museum & Nature Center
• Audubon Greenwich
• The Bruce Museum of Greenwich
• The Connecticut Audubon Society of Fairfield
• The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum of Ridgefield
• EverWonder Children’s Museum of Newtown
• Connecticut’s Beardsley Zoo of Bridgeport
• Discovery Museum of Bridgeport

Also in attendance representing Fairfield County’s Community Foundation were Director of Education & Youth Development Janeene Freeman and Manager of Data Science & Evaluation Adhlere Coffy.

"We at the foundation are so proud of being able to support this project," Freeman said, "and I think the main strength of this is the fact that there are so many different organizations represented around this table that are working together collaboratively in order to create a tool that’s going to be useful and impactful to so many different types of populations here in Fairfield County."

As part of the initiative, each institution took part in training sessions at their facilities, many of which turned into long brainstorming sessions and discussions about improving accessibility.

"This was something that we have been striving to do over the last couple of years," said Becky Newman, Director of Nature Programs for Earthplace, "to try to incorporate everyone into our educational programs and to do nature education for everyone, including those that are not normally served."

Newman said she and her team at Earthplace were given resources and a PowerPoint presentation as part of their training, which led to some deep discussions.

"We talked about accessibility and language and things we can do to help people with disabilities in the area and how we talk about it," Newman said. "We did that for all of our Visitor Service team as well as all of our preschool teachers, and it will be done for our Education team next week. I think it just made us a little more cognitive. It’s something we’ve been trying to focus on, so it reinforced what we’ve been trying to do."

For Caroline Bailey, who works both as Center Assistant at Audubon Greenwich and Teacher Naturalist at the CT Audubon Society, this initiative hit close to home.

"From a personal standpoint, my brother has autism. He’s my only sibling and he’s a lot of the reason I’m in the line of work that I am," Bailey said. "We have museums and nature centers here, and I think all these places have the capacity to really offer safe havens for people that are very healing and inclusive in many ways, not just for people with special needs. I’m just so touched that we are really going above and beyond to make the effort to tell people we want them here, and to take those steps to be inclusive."

While assembling what is essentially the Avengers of local cultural attractions was no easy task in itself, a portion of the meeting was also devoted to discussing ways the team could remain in contact and help each other continue to improve into the future.

"For me, this means so much that there are going to be so many places in Fairfield County that are taking this initiative to make ourselves more inclusive, because growing up I wished there was more of this for my own family and my brother, so I’m just honored to be a part of all this," Bailey said. "That’s really the first step more than anything; it’s saying that we’re ready and we’re open, and we want to learn how we can improve to make ourselves more accessible."