General Colorado Center Information

We’re delighted this week to have Kirsten Mau here under sleepshades, taking all the usual classes. Kirsten is the new Marketing Director for the National Federation of the Blind, headquartered in Baltimore, but she lives in the Denver area. Typically a telecommuter, she’s been using offices at CCB off and on during home remodeling. This week, however, she commutes to the Center – drives herself – and then dons her sleepshades and grabs her cane.

The purpose of sleepshade training for sighted staff is to give them the sense of how blind people successfully travel, manage information and live the lives we want every day. Kirsten has taken to her training like a champ. She knows our message and believes in blind people.

she’s worked with the NFB in consulting capacities going back several years. A marketing and social media pro, she couldn’t resist a little jab.

After spending much of the day in their chairs, giving their best in various Braille skills as part of the

Braille Challenge, participants in the Metro area competition found goal ball the perfect way to unwind.

It’s the third year we’ve hosted the event for Metro-area kids, which is organized in Colorado by the

Colorado School for the Deaf and the Blind. Students scores on reading, writing and more are collected regionally and given rankings, then compared to scores across the country. Eventually, the Braille Institute in Los Angeles will bring the most competitive students there for a final competition.

In the meantime, there’s a little goal ball, some local and regional prizes and pizza for lunch!

Cathy Kudlick, Julie Deden and Anahit LaBarre reunited for dinner last Thursday. Cathy and Anahit, who works in our Senior Services Dept., were students together in 2000 to 2001.

It has been nearly 18 years since Catherine Kudlick first arrived in Littleton as a student at CCB, but the lessons of her training have endured, as she told staff and students in Philosophy Class last Thursday.

Cathy’s blindness is due to Nystagmus and she had never used a cane before she came for training. Still, she counted her travel training as one of the most important classes for her. She told students in frank terms about her internal struggles in that class under sleepshades.

Editor’s Note: Cesar was the final student to graduate in calendar year 2017, on Friday, December 15 in fact. This is the post he made just hours after receiving his Freedom Bell. His parents drove up from Phoenix and he returned with them before our coldest weather set in, assuring us all that he was looking forward to his family’s traditional Christmas sitting around the pool. As he states below, he’s taking the skills and belief in himself as a blind person home with him.

Editor’s Note: Libby graduated from the Center this fall. She recently sent us this photo following a tour to this beautiful spot in her home state, a Navajo Tribal Park. It’s a great testament to how far a blind person can go with a white cane. Sounds like a great trip Libby!

I got to mark Antelope Canyon off my bucket list. I traveled up to northern Arizona with my cane and explored the wind- and water-whipped walls. It was absolutely spectacular! So very grateful to have had the training with my cane so that I could still navigate the dark canyon along with the rest of the tour.

Access to concepts and information presented in graphical form has long been a challenge for blind college students. In the past couple of decades the surge in digitally-displayed content has, well, gone supernova. Thus, blind college students need to develop basic tactile literacy with two- and three-dimensional representations that their sighted peers may have learned much more informally through media such as picture books, television, film, or YouTube. Blind people learn how things look best by touch.

Descriptions are a stop-gap, but only that. Thus, one aspect of our College Prep class’s goal of preparing our students to be savvy and nimble in gaining access to their studies involves taking a look at the kinds of things colleges may throw in front of them and expect them to be able to interpret.

Here we are with a white Christmas in Colorado when it was looking pretty dusty and dry. Naturally, the Center closed for the holidays, but we finished up in the spirit last Tuesday. Our traditions involve a breakfast together, provided by the GraceFull Cafe in downtown Littleton consisting of very large and very delicious breakfast burritos. (Yes, that’s a recommendation for the burritos and the GraceFull Cafe!)

The holidays are a time of giving, and our volunteers at CCB give a lot of their time to drive, read and other necessary tasks at the center. We invited them to a lunch in October, but let’s also acknowledge all they give at this time of giving and sharing.

Last Friday’s Senior Holiday Party brought together members of all three of our weekly Older Blind Programs groups that meet at the Center – Tuesday, Thursday and Friday – along with sighted and unsighted spouses (insider’s joke), and both old and new friends. There were adult children and grandchildren. There was plenty of food, lots of laughs and thanks for our great Older Blind Programs staff. But really, what everyone was celebrating was one another.

The thing that makes a difference in the lives of newly blind people is other blind people to help them to understand that blindness need not hold us back. And then, a little farther down the road, the once-newbies are passing it on to the next round of new ones.

Happy Holidays!