Older Blind Programs

Dear CCB Friends and Family –

All of us at the Colorado Center for the Blind hope that each of you had a nice Thanksgiving. The year of 2020 has brought a great deal of determination, challenge, creativity and resolve to us at CCB. The determination came from the staff who are dedicated and committed to work with our students of all ages. The challenge has been to make sure that we could continue to provide training to all of our students and our seniors in a safe manner. The creativity has been instrumental to develop innovative ways for our students and seniors to learn and to gain confidence. The resolve has been to keep moving forward, knowing that we will prevail. Our students and our seniors also have shown their determination, ability to take on challenge, creativity and resolve to live full lives.

We put this video together to serve as our report to the NFB of Colorado’s 2020 Virtual Convention October 29-31. We wanted to show the creativity of our staff and determination of our blind students of all ages to obtain the blindness skills that mean independence, which are necessary despite this pandemic. In fact, the importance of independence and blindness skills is even more critical than ever. Since filming and first showing this video, we have again moved our Independence Training Program (ITP) to be virtual until after the first of the year, while also discontinuing in-person (and socially-distanced) training sessions with our blind seniors. Clearly whether blind or sighted, resilience is a key to coping in 2020 and beyond. And resilience is something we at the Colorado Center for the Blind and in the National Federation of the Blind have some experience with.

https://youtu.be/TSU7-eTRrbo

Colorado Gives Day 2019 is December 10, and it’s the tenth year of this highly successful program to encourage online giving to Colorado nonprofits like the Colorado Center for the Blind. And we’re proud that we’ve been a part of Colorado Gives Day from the very first!

Sure, we’ll gratefully accept donations any day, any time, but Colorado Gives Day on December 10 gives all of us some distinct advantages. Let’s mention, um, 10 of them!

Editor’s Note: We were excited to receive a one-year grant from Colorado’s Next Fifty Initiative in June to provide skills training and employment services to seniors losing vision. The grant allows us to serve “seniors” from age 50 and up. So, this week Duncan, Julie and Dan are all in Grand Junction for our first-ever Seniors in Charge road trip! Here’s the press release we sent out.

For Immediate Release

Contact: Dan Burke
(406) 546-8546

Date: Sunday, August 25, 2019

Training Comes to Grand Junction for Blind Seniors

NextFifty Grant Helps Littleton-based Center Bring “Seniors in Charge” to Western Slope

Littleton – The Colorado center for the Blind (CCB), a world-renowned training center for blind adults, youth and seniors, will conduct its 4-day Seniors in Charge program for nine seniors this week at Grand Junction’s Center for Independence, 740 Gunnison Ave.

AGENDA

MAKING CONNECTIONS THAT WORK FOR YOU

3rd Annual Career and College Seminar
Wednesday, May 8, 2019

Sometimes spring arrives in Colorado in waves that feel like that bad bus driver, the one who alternately steps on the gas and then lets off, again and again, rocking you forward and back into half-nausea. That’s how it’s been this year – 80 degree days followed by an icy blast of wind and snow and then it starts again. But underfoot (and a couple of times under the snow), the grass is greening and the smell of the damp, warming soil is like a reassuring promise, while overhead in the budding trees robins and sparrows and towhees announce their return.

This morning, the Tuesday Seniors group hosted The Blind History Lady, a.k.a. Peggy Chong. Chong, a long-time member of the National Federation of the Blind, recently retired to Aurora from New Mexico with her husband, Curtis.

For a number of years she has researched stories and records of blind Americans, some as far back as the 19th century, in order to bring their more or less forgotten or never-known lives to light.

Her “blind ancestors,” as she considers them to be, become more fully rounded-out citizens, and not just Hollywood stereotypes as she tells their stories in person or in print.

¿Habla Español? ¿Es una persona mayor? Ven al grupo de apollo los invidentes al Centro de Colorado Colorado Para Personas Invidentes.

That’s right, we’ve started a seniors’ group for Spanish-speakers who are losing vision, have lost vision or are blind. It meets on the third Friday of each month from 1 p.m. to 3 p.m. at 2233 W. Shepperd Ave. in Littleton.

Sí, mañana, a la una de la tarde.

Para más información, llame a Carina Orozco, 303-778-1130, ext. 233, o e-mail, corozco@cocenter.org.

Let there be no doubt – students at the Colorado Center for the Blind form lifelong friendships. Monday, three such friends reunited at the center Kathy Kudlick, Bill Lundgren and Anahit LaBarre. They are shown above standing in front of our tactile CCB logo, left to right, Anahit, Kathy, Bill and Director Julie Deden.

All three were students at the same time, in fact, they began arriving shortly after our move to Littleton in August, 2000.

Kathy was first in October of that year. A professor of French History at the University of California-Davis at the time, she came ready to at last embrace her identity as a blind person. Today, she is Director of the Paul K. Longmore Institute on Disability at San Francisco State University.