General Colorado Center Information

A reign as Residential Manager has come to a close. None has served longer in that role. Tuesday (April 27) after hours, staff threw her a farewell party at the center, but the real party is back in her home state. Vicki (Sayler) Hedrick flew off to Oklahoma this weekend to be with her mother, Dorothy, who is recovering from brain surgery last Monday. By all reports, Dorothy is doing fine, and we are all pulling for her.

March to the Beat of Your Own Drum

Our first 2021 in-person FAST activity for youth will fittingly be all about movement, and a little music! Sign up for our April 24 FAST!

Who: Blind students of all ages and their families Where: Colorado Center for the Blind,
2233 W Shepperd Ave. Littleton, CO 80120 When: Saturday, April 24, 2021 from 11:00 AM – 1:00 PM

It’s the return of the FAST! On Saturday, April 24 from 11:00 AM – 1:00 PM, we will hold our first in-person FAST (Fun Activities & Skills Training) Program for 2021.

And what better way to kick it off then with a fun activity that involves music and movement. Join us for a mid-day session of cardio drumming with Julie, Stringball with Martin, and Soccer with Will. This activity will allow us to discuss and work on spatial awareness in a fun and exciting way.

As soon as we finish morning announcements in the main room, staff and students move to one of the seven breakout rooms: Braille, Cane Travel, Home Management, Brett’s lab, Chip’s Lab, Tech Lab or Study Lab. At 11:15 we all meet again in the main room for philosophy class.

Good evening!

This is the last blast for Colorado Gives Day. Promise.

There’s still time to donate to the Colorado Center for the Blind at the Colorado Gives page.

And as your reward for clicking on this post, you get to meet Katie. She’s a career social worker whose degenerative eye condition interrupted her professional employment, so she came for training. For the past three months she’s been posting regularly on her Face Book page about her journey at CCB. She calls this “Katie Goes to Blind School.” Here’s a portion of a post about learning to travel with a long white cane, and the other things she is learning along the way.

The skills of independence for our blind students, and indeed for our staff, are more critical in these difficult times than ever before. Even though the world has changed we all at the Colorado Center are still able to work with our students so that they will gain belief in themselves and be able to move forward with confidence and self-reliance!

Support us on Colorado Gives Day this Tuesday, December 8. And you can schedule a donation tonight if you like so that it will be counted on Tuesday.

Dear CCB Friends and Family –

All of us at the Colorado Center for the Blind hope that each of you had a nice Thanksgiving. The year of 2020 has brought a great deal of determination, challenge, creativity and resolve to us at CCB. The determination came from the staff who are dedicated and committed to work with our students of all ages. The challenge has been to make sure that we could continue to provide training to all of our students and our seniors in a safe manner. The creativity has been instrumental to develop innovative ways for our students and seniors to learn and to gain confidence. The resolve has been to keep moving forward, knowing that we will prevail. Our students and our seniors also have shown their determination, ability to take on challenge, creativity and resolve to live full lives.

We put this video together to serve as our report to the NFB of Colorado’s 2020 Virtual Convention October 29-31. We wanted to show the creativity of our staff and determination of our blind students of all ages to obtain the blindness skills that mean independence, which are necessary despite this pandemic. In fact, the importance of independence and blindness skills is even more critical than ever. Since filming and first showing this video, we have again moved our Independence Training Program (ITP) to be virtual until after the first of the year, while also discontinuing in-person (and socially-distanced) training sessions with our blind seniors. Clearly whether blind or sighted, resilience is a key to coping in 2020 and beyond. And resilience is something we at the Colorado Center for the Blind and in the National Federation of the Blind have some experience with.

https://youtu.be/TSU7-eTRrbo

Monday August 3 students and staff at the Colorado Center for the Blind met up with members of the Arapahoe County Sheriff Offices Mounted Unit at nearby Sterne Park. When Lt. Rich Anselmi, the unit’s commander first contacted Executive Director Julie Deden a while back about planning something together, Julie immediately reacted that it sounded like a lot of fun. She probably meant it would be fun for the students, too.