As we enter into a time of Thanksgiving, sharing, and celebrations, it is important that we pause to thank all of those that we are able to serve throughout the year. I’m talking about thanking all of the individuals who come into our offices or reach out online to borrow equipment, ask us for training or demonstrations of devices, take home gently used and refurbished durable medical equipment, and seek information and assistance on all kinds of assistive technology (AT).
You are the reason our team works so hard to make FAAST the organization, that it is. You are the reason that staff travels across the state to give presentations or stand behind a table sharing information. You are the reason that we continually seek learning opportunities and new information to make us better at our jobs. Yes, we have to do many of these things per funding, contracts, deliverables, etc., but we could do them all a lot differently than we do. Instead, it offers us the opportunity to work directly with someone who needs our services, who gains a new outlook on independence, or who can bring new types of AT to their clients to try after borrowing it from our library. This is what drives us to continually seek ways to expand, improve, and bring more opportunities to all Floridians with disabilities.
As we enter the second year of our two-year strategic plan, we continue to seek exciting and new ways to bring Florida’s AT program to more people of all ages and disabilities. We welcome you all through our doors, whether in Tallahassee or at one of our other eleven Regional Demonstration Centers across the state. We welcome new ideas from you, we welcome your suggestions for new assistive technology that we could add to our libraries. We welcome new opportunities to give presentations or training to your support groups, schools, or organizations. We gain and learn so much from the thousands of individuals we work with each year just by doing our jobs, and for that, I am thankful. We will continue to do all we can to provide you with bigger, better, and more robust services. From new Smart Home spaces, dedicated sensory spaces, updated and new AT, rural area focuses, and more in-depth training opportunities, FAAST is always seeking ways to give you a better understanding of what is available for independence, aging in place, transition, and daily living. We will continue to work hard to find new funding sources so we can expand as you need us to, and we are thankful that you motivated us to do that.
Thank you for making FAAST one of the tools you use, whether for your personal life or to assist others with theirs. You make all of us who are a part of the staff, an RDC, or our Advisory Council thankful every day that our work is more than just a requirement or a deliverable but instead, it is a mission.
Eric Reed, Executive Director