General Colorado Center Information

It’s Tuesday, and our blind seniors group is meeting, despite the cold. But these are the kind of folks who are determined to learn all they can about blindness, share all they can with one another and, as contributors to a positive and supportive community of blind seniors, keep living the lives they want!

I want to take a moment to thank everyone who supports the work that we do at the Colorado Center for the Blind. For, without your caring, dedication, and support, we would not have been able to do so much in the last year.

We again had our most successful Colorado Gives Day. We continue to be moved and humbled by this generosity that supports our programs. We believe that blind people can do anything, and we are thankful that you believe in us.

Here are some 2024 highlights I would like to share with you:

The Taking Charge Program

In April, six women in our Older Blind program participated in our week-long residential intensive training program. They stayed at our student apartments and took the bus to the center each day. They had classes in cooking, technology, woodshop, cane travel, and Braille.

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.

It was all about pies. That’s how we promoted our November 16 FAST (Fun Activities and Skills Training) event. We called it “Conquering the Kitchen,” and parents, youth, and teachers came from the Denver and Colorado Springs areas. Blind youth worked in the large kitchen with volunteer teachers from our Independence Training Program (ITP), while their parents were in the small kitchen with Director Julie Deden learning the same nonvisual techniques.

The snow is just about melted in the Denver area, but here’s a photo from last Thursday, just as the big storm was moving in. Travel Instructor Ernesto Lucca with his student Megan are coming back to the Center after a class on the snowy sidewalks of the city.

Megan is definitely doing things she didn’t think she would as a blind person.

“You step off of curbs, get turned around, but it’s amazing. I didn’t go anywhere before without a sighted guide. Now I’m crossing streets, taking the bus and the light rail!”

Greetings!

It’s no trick. Colorado Gives Day is December 10, with all donations for Colorado Gives Day eligible for a share of the $1 Million Incentive Fund from First Bank! Last year was our best ever, bringing in over $33,000 in donations!p> That was a big treat for us, and we thank you all again!p> When you give to the Colorado Center for the Blind, you are part of changing lives. Across Colorado, any number of our graduates who are blind parents will be taking their excited little ones trick-or-treating tonight. The belief that they can live the lives they want—including becoming parents—is in good part thanks to the Colorado Center for the Blind and your generous support!

The best is good enough for me. — Bill Daniels.

Off we went on the evening of January 10 to the Denver Museum of Nature and Science for the annual grants reception put on by the Daniels Fund. The Colorado Center for the Blind received a generous grant from the Colorado philanthropy – our fourth such grant in the past six years. The grant supports our Older Blind Programs which, like all of our programs, are all about independence and living the lives we want as blind people. Aging and disability are among the list of priorities that Bill Daniels identified when he created the fund.

(Editor’s Note:  Executive Director Julie Deden sent The letter below to the 117 donors to the Colorado Center for the Blind on Colorado Gives Day. That number doesn’t count the twenty or so students, staff, and especially seniors who contributed cash totaling $284. Nor would it include all of our supporters who give in ways that are not monetary. These of course include our volunteers, board members, and many other members in our Littleton community and National Federation of the Blind community whose support we cannot overvalue! So, as 2023 winds to its end and we prepare to hit the ground running in 2024, we want to share this letter with all of you and express our gratitude. And of course, our best to you in the New Year!)

When Fitz came to the center as a student, he really didn’t know what he wanted to do with his life, simply because he had no idea what he could do.

As an Independence Training Program (ITP) student, Fitz has been finding his own identity as a blind person. With what he thought of as a lot of residual vision, Fitz nonetheless was one, like many of us, caught in between the myth that blindness means absolute “blackness” and the hard reality of being stuck because we can’t actually see enough, and we don’t have the skills that many totally blind people use effortlessly every day. It takes a toll on self-confidence and undermines our ability to live the life we each want for ourselves.