Blindness

Monday August 3 students and staff at the Colorado Center for the Blind met up with members of the Arapahoe County Sheriff Offices Mounted Unit at nearby Sterne Park. When Lt. Rich Anselmi, the unit’s commander first contacted Executive Director Julie Deden a while back about planning something together, Julie immediately reacted that it sounded like a lot of fun. She probably meant it would be fun for the students, too.

Today Charis is graduating from the center. Hers will be a unique graduation, with the actual Freedom Bell ceremony and the “love session” that typically follows being conducted on Zoom for social distancing purposes. No hug from Julie.

Charis was just one week away from finishing her program when we closed the building in late March and many of our students went home. Graduation means, among other requirements, that she must cook a meal for the entire center. Today that’s about 30 of us altogether.

Okay, we said we’d have a video on the 2020 Census for blind folks, and here it is!

Maura finished high school last spring and plans to go on to college next year. Before she did that, however, she was determined to obtain the skills she needed to be independent as a blind person so that nothing could hold her back in college, or beyond. We’ll let Maura tell you how it’s going in this post she made last month on Face Book. And we hope you will make a donation today, Colorado Gives Day.

These past few days have been so incredible! On Friday, I completed my second CCB graduation requirement by making my mini meal. This meal is to serve 15 guests and you have to cook 3 dishes. I made rolls, potato soup and Oreo pudding pie, and I had a little over 2 days to shop for and prepare the food from scratch. Everything was a hit, especially the Oreo pie, and I felt so much excitement and energy after all was said and done.

Executive Director Julie Deden wrote this salute to the final five students graduating from the Colorado Center for the Blind in 2019.

Colorado Gives Day is this Tuesday, December 10, and as we do each year at this time, we are asking for your financial support for our programs at the Colorado Center for the Blind. In the next couple of weeks, five students will graduate from our Independence Training program. Each of these students have made tremendous accomplishments that will propel them towards an exciting life. Each of them now realizes that being blind does not need to stop them from doing what they want to do with their lives. By introducing you to these students and their compelling, unique stories, we hope you will be inspired to make a contribution to the Colorado Center for the Blind on December 10. As I wrote about each of them, I was inspired myself!

For the past three weeks, we’ve been delighted to have Adama Conteh as a special student at the Colorado Center for the Blind. Adama is from Sierra Leone, a country of about 6 million in West Africa. She has been in the U.S. under the sponsorship of Hope International, which has provided Adama with training at their headquarters in Tennessee, and transportation to Colorado to attend the Center for these three weeks.

Holly Scott-Gardner is from the United Kingdom. By many measures, she is a very successful woman, yet she wanted to come to the Colorado Center for the Blind for training. On her first day at the Center, she accepted the challenge to go rock climbing. She attended the National Federation of the Blind Convention with us in Las Vegas last month, and a few weeks ago attended a conference on blindness in Guadalajara, Mexico.

We thought the best introduction to Holly would be to send you to her recent blog post about being at the Center. On her blog site, you can learn much more about her.

Read Holly Scott-Gardner’s blog post, Measuring the Impossible.

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.

Colorado Gives Day is Tuesday, December 4, and we’re in for the mega-million-dollar statewide day of giving, sponsored by First Bank and the Community First Foundation! Your gift to us on CoGivesDay2018 ensures that we can continue to offer programs to youth, seniors and working-age adults that challenge, impart skills and infuse the confidence in themselves our students can draw on throughout the rest of their lives!

Sure, we’ll take your gifts any time, but there are some advantages to both of us if you contribute on December 4: