General Colorado Center Information

I am pleased to be able to make another large donation this year. (I know) one of your alumni and seeing the incredible impact you have made in her life makes me want to give as much as I can. God bless you all. True charity is anonymous, I do not need any recognition of accolades beyond being able to continue to see you do incredible work.

So let’s talk about Summer 2017. We’re including a few photographic highlights from this year. Along with these activities, many students had their first jobs this summer. Maggie, for example, is starting her sophomore year of high school in Arizona. She was matched with our perennial partner, “Arapahoe Community College (ACC)” to work in their e-learning Department.

Somebody had to do it. So Jamie Principato decided she would take the skills she’d learned and taught herself as a blind Physics student involved with a Colorado Space Grant rocket project and teach them to other blind students.

That’s where the idea of BLAST came from – Blind Learning All Skills Too launched on August 10 with the express purpose of teaching other blind people the skill of soldering small electronic devices, the precursors of instruments like those Principato and other students at Arapahoe Community College (ACC) built earlier to send high into the Earth’s atmosphere.

Quite a few, it turns out.

Staff and students held an Eclipse Party to celebrate and enjoy the 92 percent coverage of the sun today. Students in Home Management prepared a black bean salsa and cookies to start things off about 10:30 this morning as we took time to learn a little more about the eclipse.

Among our tools was the recently published Getting a Feel for Solar Eclipses, published by NASA. It featured tactile (and colorful) graphics of a solar eclipse and a tactile map of the United States depicting the path of totality.

More than 70 people stopped by the Colorado Center for the Blind on Monday for a tour, and we’d like to send out a big “Thank you!” to all of you!

This is the third year we’ve opened our doors for tours as part of Littleton’s Western Welcome Week. We’re always excited to meet new neighbors who want to find out what we’re all about. This year, we even had some who returned for a second time!

So, thanks to all who came and if you couldn’t make it, we’ll be part of WWW next year too – and we’ll see you in the parade on Saturday!

We’re excited to open our doors to the Littleton community once again during Western Welcome Week. We will give tours to all comers between 3 and 7 p.m. today. Our students will be in their classes and staff will talk about what we teach in each area – Braille, Cane Travel, Home Management, Technology and Wood Shop. We’ll also show visitors our gym with exercise stations and goal ball court, and have stops to learn about our art and STEM programming.

We’re proud of our senior programs and how they have changed the lives of seniors who have lost vision and the people who love them. We’re excited about how those programs continue to grow – from the residential Seniors in Charge (twice a year), to four support groups (one in Spanish), to ever-expanding opportunities to provide outreach services.

And so we’re proud of our new Senior Program video, made with filmmaker and long-time collaborator Djuna “DJ” Zupancic. The video doesn’t talk about all the program details as much as it endeavors to tell what those programs and services have meant to five seniors in particular.

Embodied in these seniors and in their stories are the values that drive our Senior Services – indeed everything we do at CCB – skills that build belief in ourselves, a community that supports us, hope where there was uncertainty and maybe just a skosh of defiance!

Thanks to DJ for her highly professional and creative work. She gets us!

There wasn’t time to sit still till lunch was served, but none were inclined to do so at Saturday’s #NFChallenge Olympic Day 2017. There were just too many things to try out – beep baseball demonstration with the Colorado Storm, judo and power-lifting, goal ball and tandem bicycling with Eye-Cycle! Everybody got to take a turn at three or four of these activities, and a few even took a second bike ride or got into a couple of actual goal ball matches!

But participants were able to sit still long enough to listen to Paralympic runner Chaz Davis talk about how he went from “overweight and out-of-shape” to being the current record-holder in the marathon for blind and visually impaired runners.

And then it was back to another round of fun – and fitness – activities!

About 90 people collected in the meeting room on a 95-degree day to share a little summer society. It was CCB’s annual Ice Cream Social, ranging from Confidence Camp kids as young as 6 to Older Blind Programs participants who declined to reveal their ages, and all of the staff and students of our middle school, high school and college-bound students and Independence Training Program.

What they all had in common was blindness and the determination and desire to take charge with confidence, and today that meant taking charge of a drumstick or ice cream bar!

  The Colorado Center for the Blind received word in May that we had been recertified by the National Blindness Certification Board for another three years, and that we received the first-ever score of 100 percent following the onsite review. That news was reported last week to the CCB Board of Directors!

Our distinguished Board of Directors met here at the Center on June 2 and 3 to hear how things are going, to discuss both the immediate and the more distant future of programs and growth at the Center.

Delma Taylor and her husband Ed have been attending our Senior Program for longer than anyone. Delma was the one who’d lost her sight, and Ed came for support and to give it as well. A few years ago Ed’s sight failed too, and they kept coming.

Ed passed away in April and, the day after Memorial Day, Delma and her son Ron came with family to plant a Peace Rose in our Legacy Garden. Duncan and some of the seniors came out to the garden as son Ron and great-nephew Isaac (shown in the photo above) did the digging and the planting.

We send our sympathies to Delma and the taylor family for their loss, and thank them for the honor of having Ed’s memorial rose in our garden!