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June 2013
1 post
June 2011
2 posts
The Smithsonian Folklife Festival is Committed to Making the Event Accessible and Enjoyable
by Van Luong
The Smithsonian Folklife Festival is held outdoors on the National Mall, and our team is committed to making the event as accessible and enjoyable as possible for all visitors. American Sign Language interpreters are scheduled throughout the day at selected stages clearly marked on the Festival schedule. This year, we will also offer several days of CART (Communication Access Realtime Translation), with dates and times to be marked on the Festival schedule.
Visit us at Information kiosks and at the Volunteer Tent, where we offer wheelchairs on loan, large-print versions of the daily schedule and food concession menus, and Festival program books on CD and in other formats upon request. Information kiosks are located at several points around the Festival site, and the Volunteer Tent is located in the Festival Services area near the Smithsonian Metrorail station’s Mall exit.
Verbal-description and tactile tours are scheduled for July 2 and July 8 at 1 p.m. for visitors who are blind or have low vision; reservations may be made by e-mailing access@si.edu. To request other access services not listed above, such as real-time captioning, please call (202) 633-2921 (voice) or e-mail access@si.edu. All music-stage locations are equipped with audio loops.
The Smithsonian Folklife Festival welcomes all service animals.
May 2011
7 posts
Peace Corps Project in Guatemala
by Van Luong
The Peace Corps program at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival will feature the work of former Peace Corps volunteer Laura Kutner, who built a schoolhouse in Granados, Guatemala, using discarded drink bottles and trash that once littered the community. Ms. Kutner rallied the agricultural community of 900 and surrounding mountain villages to collect more than 4,000 used plastic drink bottles from ditches, gutters, and trash piles. The drink bottles were stuffed with plastic bags to give them greater heft, then tied together with chicken wire and plastered with a cement mix to build two new school rooms.
Find out more about this excellent recycling project and come meet Ms. Kutner and her colleagues from Guatemala at the 2011 Smithsonian Folklife Festival.
