Self-Determination

Downhill is great, but rolling with confidence makes it even better. Students worked together today in Mobility class to navigate a decline while safely wrapped in their walking canes and under the guidance of their instructors.

Our 2016 Colorado Gives Day was our most successful ever, and we want to thank all of our friends and new acquaintances who helped make it so!

In all, we received $15,230 via the online Colorado Gives web site, and all of that counts toward a share of the $1 million Incentive Fund offered by First Bank and the Community First Foundation. In addition, we received another $11,275 in checks on December 6 from supporters who don’t favor online giving for one reason or another. No matter, we’re excited and thankful for all our donations, which totaled $26,505!

We’re still getting a few checks and online donations, and all these funds go toward the costs of programs like our Confidence Camp for Kids (see photo above), challenge recreation and special programs for seniors.

We had a little bit of snow this morning, but not enough to keep us at home. Snow is just a part of everyday life and for our students, learning to travel in all weather means feeling confident about traveling to their jobs someday.

But it was cold, and will be colder tomorrow!

Philosophy bakes no bread. Philosopher Bertrand Russell said that. But a wise man we know once pointed out that no bread is baked without philosophy. Tabea graduated from CCB in 2016 and has gone on to graduate school. She knows that our belief in our blind students is the yeast that leavens the bread of our students’ confidence and self-determination! Indeed, in our Senior and Youth Programs as well!

Please support us tomorrow, COGivesDay, December 6!

“I cook all the time now that I’ve been here as a student,” Chris says in this mini-meal video. He took his first shot at baking a pie – three pies actually, sour cream apple pies. He graduates next week! “Crable” is his CCB nickname.

The kitchens at CCB are just a few steps away from the lobby where Robert mans the front desk and management offices are located. Because our students are constantly cooking up amazing things in the kitchens, the odors filling the lobby area are sometimes maddeningly wonderful. That was certainly the case a few weeks ago when Chris prepared and served his mini-meal for fifteen.

You hear from us all the time about what’s going on at the Center, so here’s a chance to get a student’s story from the very first.

Graham arrived in Denver from Brooklyn in mid-October, and he’s been blogging each week about his time at the Center for his friends back home and wherever. Check out his blog, See What I Did There.

Before learning to carve a turkey, a blind person can greatly benefit from learning the bird by touch – how things are connected and how they will come apart. Since our students and Home Management staff started preparations for our own Thanksgiving meal (held a week before the actual holiday) Dishon Spears led students through this discovery process with turkeys that had been cooked and then refrigerated over night.

After that are some shots of all the food we ate! We have a lot to be thankful for!

We were more than ready by noon last Thursday! We’d been waiting for this meal for two weeks, smelling the roasting turkeys and the pies and so much more! Of course, all of our students had a part in preparing it, so they’d been right in the kitchen smelling what we were at last all going to be very, very thankful for!

It’s an annual event. A week before Thanksgiving we hold our own Thanksgiving gathering at the Center prior to everyone’s dispersal to families and friends across the country. We start off after morning classes with an hour or so of potluck appetizers furnished by staff and maybe a game or two. It’s our time to be together, and it’s a big deal and a big meal.

A very big meal! This year, under the guidance of our Home Management Instructors Maureen, Shon and Delfina, our students prepared four turkeys, three kinds of stuffing, 30 pounds of potatoes, green bean-mushroom casserole (and one without), mac and cheese, a ham and pumpkin and pecan pies. There were candied yams and sweet potatoes and 100 homemade dinner rolls.

It’s that time of the year. Just as we start to think about turkey and stuffing with cranberries, it’s time for blind kids in the area to get hands-on with shark innards!

As he has for more than a decade, Arapahoe Community College’s Biology Professor Terry Harrison will lead a shark dissection at CCB on Friday, November 18. Harrison has partnered with CCB to ensure that blind kids in Colorado get actual experience in this one aspect of the STEM fields (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math). Participants will handle the scalpels, determine sex, examine the lungs, liver and those sharp little dog shark teeth.

Start time is 10 a.m. on Friday and wraps up at 1 p.m. following pizza (no anchovies).

Students, teachers, or parents can contact Youth Services Director Brent Batron for more information or to reserve a spot – after all, there are only going to be so many sharks!