It’s Colorado’s biggest online giving event of each year, and just about our biggest fund-raising event too! It’s on the news, in your email box – just about everywhere.

But just so you don’t forget, you can go online at https://www.coloradogives.org/donate/CoCenter and schedule a donation to roll over on December 6. That’s the day your gift will count toward our percentage of the $1 Million Incentive Fund for Colorado Gives Day!

Diane told the crowd that she’s decided 90 isn’t enough, and she plans to make 100 years.
Okay, we’ll start planning that party now!

Yes, it’s the 90th birthday of our founder, Diane McGeorge.

“Don’t ever give up!” That was the advice Diane gave to students and everyone else at a celebration of her 90th birthday yesterday at the Colorado Center for the Blind. And Diane never has.

A while back, the Philosophy class met in the gym and student Jamila Lane led us through a “Privilege Walk.”

Jamila, from Atlanta, previously participated in Privilege Walks in both her undergraduate and graduate studies, but it was her first time leading one.

“Disability added a very interesting layer to it,” she said, “because everyone in this group is blind.”

Meaning that for questions that involved disability, almost everyone had to stand still or step back, and more than once as a result, leaving most of the staff and students clustered around the center line by the end.

On Saturday, April 16, 2022 an international Internet radio concert of 110 mostly blind artists contributed to the World Blind Union’s Ukrainian Unity Fund. More than $85,000 was raised to provide aid to blind Ukrainians displaced or otherwise adversely affected by the current warfare in their homeland. The Colorado Center for the Blind, along with our sister NFB centers, the Louisiana Center for the Blind and BLIND, Inc, were asked by NFB President Riccobono to make our own recordings of support for the effort, as all of us in the NFB and President Riccobono have been deeply disturbed by the horrific conditions faced by all Ukrainians, and especially blind Ukrainians.

Some things just don’t translate to the virtual. (Okay, after nearly two years with Zoom in our lives in a big way, we can say that a lot of things don’t really translate well.) Let’s put our annual shark dissection for blind and low vision students high on that list.

And we’re not talking about the smell of fishy Formaldehyde down in the gym, though that is also true.

We missed a year because of COVID concerns in 2021, and you could feel that surge like we are coming back as nearly 30 students participated in this year’s annual shark dissection with Arapahoe Biology Professor Terry Harrison on Monday.

Students from every continent and every epoch imagine, even if only idly, of someday, somehow turning the tables on their teachers. Likely they don’t realize until they have done it, that their teachers also may see such a reversal as an opportunity to return the torment.

That’s partly the story of Role Reversal Day 2022, held on Friday, February 4. Hand it to the leadership of the CCB Student Association for organizing carefully and thoroughly, putting staff into groups and planning the schedule, even reviewing lesson plans from each ”teacher of the day.” This is the group, remember, that collected necessary items for the NICU babies when Avista Adventist Hospital was forced to evacuate during the December, 30 Marshall Fire in Boulder County. They also received an additional $820 in cash donations which were donated to the Marshall Fire relief fund.

This December 7 you surpassed previous years with your support for the Colorado Center for the Blind and our programs for blind people of all ages, making 2021 one of the best we’ve been lucky enough to experience on Colorado Gives Day. And we’ve been part of it from the very beginning.

So, we are more grateful than ever for the incredible support of our community in one of the more difficult years any of us may have experienced.

The blindness training we offer, and the confidence it builds in our blind students, is not an end, but a means. Ryan is an IT project manager. Erin is an insurance underwriter. Garrett is finishing law school, Charis is pursuing her degree in chemistry. Just this year, Evan’s internship at the Audio Information Network of Colorado (AINC) turned into a permanent job. Carolina realized that she loves working with children and has an internship at a preschool. Cragar returned to work on his degree in Atmospheric Science with new technology and Braille skills that brought in the grades he has always known he is capable of.

Often, our students confess that they thought their useful lives were at an end when they became blind, but that they regain a sense of themselves – a new sense of themselves as blind people – that restores their belief in themselves and their capacity to pursue old and new dreams. That’s what we mean when we say our training is a means – it’s a means for our blind students to take charge of their lives. Confident and self-reliant!