Initiative Description
This year APTAT developed a new partnership with United Ability, a nonprofit in central Alabama whose mission is provide services that empower individuals to live full and meaningful lives. Through additional AT Act funding from FY 2022 APTAT was able to contract with United Ability to add part time staff who directly worked with our program to develop our lending library and demonstration center and fulfill training requests. Due to state agency and funding limitations, APTAT would otherwise only have 2 full time staff to support most of our activities but through this initiative we were able to use a portion of time from an additional project manager/assistive technology specialist, AT professional, and 3 program assistants. In addition, APTAT was able to collaborate on projects of two of United Ability's speech language pathologists who brought innovative ideas for increasing assistive technology access across the state that impacted the areas of early intervention and augmentative communication.
With the additional staff support, APTAT was able to achieve its goal of doubling short-term loan and demonstration inventory by the end of the fiscal year. Together, we also fulfilled 53 training opportunities for 1,834 participants, nearly 4x the impact from last year. The partnership also brought invaluable opportunity to cohost the inaugural AT Alabama Resource Expo and Learning Event which made it possible for the program's network to expand since United Ability is an established and well-known organization.