Independence Training Program

Landon began his training at the Colorado Center for the Blind a month after he graduated from high school. He’s from a small town in South Carolina. It’s the kind of town where everybody knows everybody else.

Our Legacy Garden planting is complete, helped again this year by our partners with Arapahoe County Master Gardeners and of course all the rain in the past few weeks. (Actually, all the rain has made it difficult to plant on some days because the ground was too wet.)

We are excited to introduce you to Dan Nixon, our new Home Maintenance and Wood Shop instructor.

Technically, Dan has already been with us for a couple of months, but of course, he’s been doing training under learning shades, including training in the wood shop, so that he comes to thoroughly understand how blind people can effectively use nonvisual skills to accomplish any number of tasks in the shop or around the home.

(Editor’s Note: This email was forwarded to Director Julie Deden from JoAnne, one of the Arapahoe County Master Gardeners we’ve worked with for many years. The Master Gardeners have been working with our students since early May to prepare the Legacy Garden and begin planting. JoAnne gives a great summary of Tuesday, June 13’s activities and, indeed, of the season thus far. BTW, we’ve had a lot of rain for the Colorado Front Range this year. A lot of rain!

In June, 2022 we hosted journalist Jason Strother for a week of training at the Center. Jason, who has worked for years as a free-lance reporter and was headquartered for a time in Seoul, South Korea, was researching a story about how blind people obtain food. Groceries, that is. His interest in this subject is personal, as he describes in the podcast linked below, Jason has a form of Macular Degeneration, and in recent years changes in his vision have increasingly presented barriers when he shops for food. So, he took a journalist’s approach to see how blind people went about obtaining their comestibles, and that included a stop at the Colorado Center for the Blind in Littleton.

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.