Many conferences we attend if not all we do seek funding for some if not all of the costs.
The local school system gets parent training dollars and those funds can be sought to help families gain knowledge on their child's disability. Contact in our area is the local FDLRS program although yours might be different. You can call your local ESE department and ask them who manages the IDEA parent training dollars. These funds are monitored so your area might have a parent board to help decide what these funds get spent on...call and start gaining knowledge on where your parent dollars are being channeled, THANK YOU!
Local boards you can sit on. I sit on the Family Care Council board which funds me to go to the DD awareness day each year in Tallahassee where I am provided gas for travel and hotel room for my family to stay in Tallahassee to advocate for disabilities, they help fund our stay at the annual Family CAFE so that I can continue to provide current accurate up to date information to local families. They can support and did this year support part of our travel to Orlando to the National Down syndrome conference. Join local boards and be active in advocating for your causes. THANK YOU!
This trip we did get a part of the conference registration fee paid through our local Early steps program that services baby's with special needs ages zero to three. This was a big surprise last minute and actually made the trip possible last minute. THANK YOU!
Advocate agency's such as FIN, FND, Family CAFE and many, many more offer or can help locate parts of funding to get families to conferences. ASK.... your local support groups can fund raise so get active and be a part of planning.... this past conference when Kaitlyn was chosen to be a young advocate she was provided funding by LEAD which was wonderful THANK YOU! although other avenues can be found these are the ones we used. We have been active in the local support group and a couple years ago did hot dog sales for months to gain funds to travel to that annual National Down syndrome conference.
Conferences also provide some waived fees and funding so please ask, NDSC waived many self advocates I referred and some parents who are active in sharing knowledge.. the local Florida PWSA funds most of our hotel stays so we can go learn as much as we can for PWS as it is a huge part of our day to day need to know. THANK YOU!
I use my respite provider in place and use waiver dollars, also end of the year general revenue dollars can be used for conferences that occur before June 30th.. "Family CAFE" so if you wish info on that please email and I will help you. It does make a world of difference if you have quality respite during a conference so you can focus on learning and have no worries about your child/ren.
If you have specific questions feel free to email me.
