Long Island University’s Brooklyn Campus and ConnecTV Join
 With Disability Community to Forge International Connections

Brooklyn, N.Y. - In a landmark international video conferencing project, Long Island University’s Brooklyn Campus will serve as host to scholars, students and experts from the disability community for unique exchanges with similar groups around the country and the world.  

The Brooklyn Campus is collaborating with ConnecTV, New York City’s broadcast TV training program for people with disabilities, in this historic event to promote dialogue between members of the disability community.

At the Brooklyn Campus, the conferees next meet on Thursday November 11, Tuesday November 16, Wednesday, November 17 and Friday, December 3. Previous sessions took place October 22, October 26 and October 29.

“It gives us the opportunity to find out about many of the issues of concern to members of the active disability community,” said Ellen Nuzzi, an adjunct assistant professor and academic counselor in the Campus’s Special Educational Services, Achievement Studies and Renaissance Program and who herself uses a wheelchair. “It’s important for the world to know we exist.”

ConnecTV launched this effort to facilitate an international disability network. Its website, www.ConnecTV.org, will serve as a convenient meeting place for people with disabilities to continue this community-building process.

Other participants include VSA Arts, Rehabilitation International and partnering disability groups across the globe, including in Durban, South Africa, Amman, Jordan, Adelaide, Australia, Paris, Tokyo, Hong Kong and London.

The Brooklyn Campus has long sought to support people with disabilities. Well before the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act, it was one of the first fully accessible campuses in the New York City area. Among those supporting this project are the Campus’s departments of media arts and occupational therapy, and the offices of student services and special education.

Students from City University of New York and New York University and other schools have been invited to attend these sessions. The Queens Borough Public Library will host two sessions on November 9 and 13.

For more information, call Anne Scott at (718) 488-4507; or Chris Arnold at (212) 966-4510 x 241 or (646) 529-8377 or by email at chris@dctvny.org.

Long Island University opened its Brooklyn Campus in 1926, welcoming a diverse population at a time when other major universities enforced quota systems against racial and ethnic minorities. Some 31,000 students currently are enrolled at the university’s three residential and three regional campuses, including more than 12,000 at the Brooklyn Campus. Located at the corner of Flatbush Avenue Extension and DeKalb Avenue in Downtown Brooklyn, the Campus is accessible to all major bus and subway routes and the Long Island Rail Road.

Downtown Community TV Center’s ConnecTV Program has been training producers with disabilities since 2002 in all aspects of broadcast production, with generous support from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Christopher Reeve Paralysis Foundation, the New York State Council on the Arts, Verizon and the National Endowment for the Arts. ConnecTV’s award-winning films have been shown in festivals in Brooklyn, London, Moscow and Manila.