General Colorado Center Information

Diane told the crowd that she’s decided 90 isn’t enough, and she plans to make 100 years.
Okay, we’ll start planning that party now!

Yes, it’s the 90th birthday of our founder, Diane McGeorge.

“Don’t ever give up!” That was the advice Diane gave to students and everyone else at a celebration of her 90th birthday yesterday at the Colorado Center for the Blind. And Diane never has.

A while back, the Philosophy class met in the gym and student Jamila Lane led us through a “Privilege Walk.”

Jamila, from Atlanta, previously participated in Privilege Walks in both her undergraduate and graduate studies, but it was her first time leading one.

“Disability added a very interesting layer to it,” she said, “because everyone in this group is blind.”

Meaning that for questions that involved disability, almost everyone had to stand still or step back, and more than once as a result, leaving most of the staff and students clustered around the center line by the end.

This December 7 you surpassed previous years with your support for the Colorado Center for the Blind and our programs for blind people of all ages, making 2021 one of the best we’ve been lucky enough to experience on Colorado Gives Day. And we’ve been part of it from the very beginning.

So, we are more grateful than ever for the incredible support of our community in one of the more difficult years any of us may have experienced.

The blindness training we offer, and the confidence it builds in our blind students, is not an end, but a means. Ryan is an IT project manager. Erin is an insurance underwriter. Garrett is finishing law school, Charis is pursuing her degree in chemistry. Just this year, Evan’s internship at the Audio Information Network of Colorado (AINC) turned into a permanent job. Carolina realized that she loves working with children and has an internship at a preschool. Cragar returned to work on his degree in Atmospheric Science with new technology and Braille skills that brought in the grades he has always known he is capable of.

Often, our students confess that they thought their useful lives were at an end when they became blind, but that they regain a sense of themselves – a new sense of themselves as blind people – that restores their belief in themselves and their capacity to pursue old and new dreams. That’s what we mean when we say our training is a means – it’s a means for our blind students to take charge of their lives. Confident and self-reliant!

It’s our job at the Colorado Center for the Blind to believe in our students, often well-before they begin to believe in themselves.

“We see you struggle when you first come for training, ” Assistive Technology Instructor Brett Boyer often says, “but we also have the privilege of watching you grow … and it’s always amazing.”

It is a privilege, and a joy. But it’s not a passive observation, because all of our instructors teach, challenge, push a little, pull a little, and encourage all along the way to give our students the opportunity to learn the things that make them increasingly independent and to develop the resilience and ingenuity to continue to learn and grow after the student moves on. Students go on to work or more training or college or, as happens sometimes, back to the work they did before they became blind.

Nothing tempers the desire of our students to find the tools and the belief in themselves that will sustain them in their quest to live lives of independence and success!

And so, still cautious, still wearing masks indoors all day, the Colorado Center for the Blind carries on with the training and the programs that will give our blind students those tools – in the kitchen, at the (computer) keyboard, reading electronic Braille displays and traveling the Denver Metro area on RTD. Indeed, these are the tools upon which to build for a lifetime!

It’s Etiquette Day in Home Management, and one of our newest students decided to dress up for the occasion. Sure, his attire is not strictly “black-tie” but definitely a cut or two above our normal business casual.

For Etiquette Day our Home Management teachers, Delfina and Stefanie walk students through everything from proper place settings to the techniques of maintaining polite manners when you can’t see your food.

Dan H took this as an opportunity to set himself apart. Every item from the brown felt hat, to the suit coat from Korea, to the tiny tie and the rings and beads, have some significance related to important people in his life – his mother and father, his sisters and his fiancée.

They love Chaz Davis in his hometown of Grafton, Mass. But we are just as proud of him here in Littleton, Colo. at the Colorado Center for the Blind!

Chaz, a 2016 Paralympian in Rio and a 2017 graduate of CCB, won the Boston Marathon’s visually impaired division on October 11. It was the 125th Boston Marathon, but the first year that this division was available for blind runners to register in. Previous blind marathoners in Boston just … well, ran.

Blind runners run with a guide to whom they are tethered, meaning that the guide and blind runner must be carefully matched as far as speed and endurance, and marathon runners may change guides during a race.