NDEAM 2026 Event

GRADS Meeting August 27, 2026

Middlebrook Community Room at 6:30 PM

Four people attended the Grant Roberts Area Disability Supports meeting.

ADA Exit Report

Rachael Johnson shared the Americans with Disabilities Act Celebration Exit Report. Discussion followed. We may order less sandwiches (3 to 31/2 party trays) as we usually serve 38-40 people. We should try to have more winners at Bingo to distribute prizes more evenly. We had good news coverage fron the Sisseton Courier and The Grant County Review. Thanks to Diane Stewart and MaryLou Bullert for their help in advertising our event. Kudos to First Bank & Trust, Voc. Rehab., and the staff at the Milbank Visitor Center for all the help in making the evening so successful.

Knights of Columbus Donation

We thank Duane Tillman for the fantastic work in calling Bingo. Even more, we are grateful for the generous donation he presented to GRADS on behalf of the Milbank Knights of Columbus.

NDEAM/Sisseton

The National Disability Employment Awareness Month event will be on Tuesday, October 13, 2026 at the Family Life Center, 404 W. Hickory Street, Sisseton, SD. A catered meal will be served at 6:00 p.m. followed by featured speaker, Julie Johnson Dresbach. The evening will conclude with recognition of Project Skills participants. RSVP to Rachael at 605-698-7445 or email striping@venturecomm.net by October 9. We discussed providing gift cards to the honored Project Skills employees who are in attendance. Char Athey will contact Laura Maag about bringing a group from LifeQuest to this event.

Financial Report

The current checking account balance in First Bank& Trust I Milbank is $4,177.06.

Group Text Messages

Rachael Johnson will make a group text contact list to use in addition to the current email distribution list.

Next Meeting

The next GRADS meeting will be on November 19, 2026 at 6:30 p.m. at the Middlebrook Community Room, 402 E. Milbank Ave., Milbank. We will focus on doing GRADS history utilizing photos of past events. Subsequent GRADS meetings will be in February and April of 2027.