Frequently Asked Questions
May 22, 2013
What is the Nemo News?
It is an experimental on-line news feed serving the special needs community in the Lake County Area of Illinois. It acts as a local clearinghouse by providing frequent postings on news of interest to transition age and older individuals with disabilities. The broad information needs of this community are largely unmet by traditional media and agency communications. TheNemoNews.com provides objective, permission-based, cross-agency information and reviews to readers. It is a ground-up clearinghouse.
TheNemoNews.com envisions creation of a national network of local news clearinghouses that focus on the information needs of the (young) adult community of those with special needs.
How did it get started?
TheNemoNews.com began when two mothers of high schoolers with special needs found that they were utterly baffled by how the system worked after high school. Both had degrees, volunteered frequently at school and were uber-pro-active. And yet they were baffled as to how to help their children enter adulthood, let alone achieve independence. As they began to educate themselves, they realized that right now, every parent re-creates the wheel. They wanted to share what they learned with other parents.
Who is the publisher?
The first post was made in October 2011. It was made by Mary Curran Rhodes. She is a parent of a young adult with developmental delay and the principal funder, writer, and promoter of the site. She has nearly completed a business plan at this writing.
Why is it focused on local news?
All services are local. If one cannot get to a program, resource or service – even an excellent one – the program doesn’t matter. The architecture of services is federal, state, local and private. The implementation varies widely by locality. Neighboring counties can have vastly different systems for access, registration and use of the same “federal” program.
An analogy. Looking down on the rain forest canopy, (ie, Washington) one might see that it is “all covered”. Looking up from the floor (ie, Mom), all you see is a sea of monkeys, shadows and confusion. One hopes it is not quite that bad, but it expresses the “point-of-view” problem.
All services are local. TheNemoNews provides local news, generally within a 1 hour drive of a regional center. The geographic boundaries in eventual network of local news clearinghouses will vary widely between rural and urban centers.
Hyperlocal news is a new publishing modality that uses the internet to provide local news of interest that may not be available otherwise. The most famous example is AOL’s http://patch.org
For more information contact: Mary Curran Rhodes, mary@thenemonews.com
Reference on the 88% living at home figure. http://rtc.umn.edu/misc/pubcount.asp?publicationid=209.
