By Ryan Strunk

(Editor’s Note: Our state President gave the following report on Saturday morning at our fall convention held in St. Cloud. The energy and excitement in the room were obvious as Ryan Strunk recounted our many achievements this past year and inspired us to keep moving forward in the year ahead.)

The grass in the park was cut short, but it was thick and lush. Ben sat cross-legged under a tree, trailing his fingers through it, occasionally plucking up stray blades and tossing them aside. When we asked him what he was doing, he said he was looking for Rex the Purple Dinosaur’s keys.

We stood in a circle in that grass, kicking and tossing a ball to one another, and Silas and Kyra laughed and shrieked when the ball slipped past them and they had to chase it down.

They climbed trees, they played tag, and they held my hands and we spun and spun until their feet came off the ground, and they flew.

And my heart soared.

We do things in this organization that benefit us individually. The programs we create and the battles we win result in advances we each get to take advantage of. Whether it is websites we helped make accessible or voting machines which allow us to cast ballots independently, we get to enjoy the fruits of our labor. When we convince Congress to pass the Greater Accessibility and Independence through Nonvisual Access Technology Act, I will be one of the first people out there to buy an accessible treadmill.

Besides that, though, so much of what we do goes beyond the opportunities we create for ourselves and spreads out into the world around us, creating ripples that touch other people’s lives. In 2016, we secured additional senior funding for State Services for the Blind to enable them to teach more people, even though many of us are not yet seniors, and even though some of the people who receive that training will never even think about joining our organization. For many of us, our public school days are long behind us, and yet we each continue to fight to ensure blind students in Minnesota have access to an equal education that includes braille, orientation and mobility, and access to assistive technology.

As we reflect on our accomplishments over the past year, I want you to hold that idea of generosity in your mind. I want you to hold those laughing children close to your heart, and I want you to know that the world is better for the work we do.

As we were preparing for our 2019 spring convention, we were contacted by Debrework Damte, a Minnesotan woman from Ethiopia and founder of the ADDIS Foundation for Community Health, asking if we would contribute blindness materials such as braille and canes to a school for the blind in that country. Our members brought slates and styluses, paper, spare canes, and money, and we put together a care package for children at the school for the blind there. At the beginning of September, we received an email from Debrework informing us that the package had been delivered. Attached to that email was this note: We thank you on behalf of children, whom you are supporting to tackle their problems. Please see the attached photo that shows as we handed over the materials. God bless you and your families.

You made that happen. Thank you for your generosity.

Our membership committee has been working hard this year to recruit new members into The National federation of the Blind and help us develop more leaders. In May, we hosted a leadership seminar that included members from across the state as well as both divisions. We discussed philosophy, learned about our history, planned fundraisers, and challenged one another to grow and develop in new ways.

Sometimes leadership means planning a project or presiding over a meeting, but more often than not, leadership means leading by example, putting in the time and energy it will take to make things happen. I appreciate the leaders in our organization who shared that weekend with us, and I appreciate the membership committee for their months of planning. I look forward to holding another seminar very soon.

We depend on engagement from the public to help us raise money for our organization and to help us raise awareness about important issues. A major part of this work is our social media outreach, which we have worked to increase over the past year. We now have 655 followers on our Facebook page, up from 500 at this time last year. We also now have 888 Twitter followers. From 2017 to 2018, we posted on twitter five times. During the 2018 convention alone, we posted 50 tweets. Posts from our accounts reach hundreds of people. Each of the photos from our Walk for Opportunity was seen over 300 times.

This increased activity has resulted in engagement from the public. A mother posted on our page asking about activities in the cities for her blind daughter. Earlier this week Community Shares of Minnesota shared our website on their page. Representative Kelly Morrison retweeted our comment about meeting with her during our day at the capitol and thanked us for our advocacy work.

This, Sam Flax and Kayde Rieken tell me, is only the beginning of what we can do if we all work together to grow our social media presence. I ask you, if you’re on social media, to share our posts, retweet our tweets—I’ve always wanted to say that—and help us write content to share with the world that highlights the NFB of Minnesota.

Our members have been busy in the community. We have held picnics, bratwurst sales, spaghetti feeds, meet the blind month activities, and our walk for opportunity. We have attended legislative hearings, and we are active members on many committees of the state rehabilitation council - Blind. Four of our members even serve on the council itself. To illustrate just how deep this runs, though, at the council’s most recent meeting, there were eight people in the audience. Of those, seven were federationists. There is something amazingly selfless about that, that so many members came on a Thursday night to represent our organization and advocate for quality services.

Whether it is inside in the halls of government or outside in city parks and hot dog stands, the public sees us, and we continue to educate them that the blind of Minnesota will be a visible force in the world.

A large part of my personal success is due to the education I received as a child in the alternative techniques of blindness. I may have resisted the cane then, but learning it early nonetheless has given me the opportunity to travel with confidence. I know some of you in this room have had the same experience. I know many of you have not.

We all know, however, that early access to training in blindness skills is a vital part of a successful education for blind children. Unfortunately, too many children in Minnesota are not getting the access they need. There are far too few teachers to adequately teach them blindness skills, and that number of teachers is dropping as more and more teachers retire.

We have spent significant time working to secure funding for an in-state college program to educate aspiring teachers of blind students with the goal of increasing the number of teachers in Minnesota, but even as we conduct this important work, university programs dedicated to vocational rehabilitation are decreasing in our region of the country. We will continue to explore the establishment of a local university program, but as this work progresses, we will also explore options to increase the number of qualified teachers in Minnesota, such as distance learning, and we will continue to fight to ensure that already qualified blind people with National Orientation and Mobility Certifications are accepted as teachers here.

The school systems may be understaffed, but our resolve and our talent are strong. We will teach blind children as often as we can, and we will continue to fight to secure an equal education for every blind Minnesotan.

This is why we held our BELL program—to make sure that blind children receive the gift of literacy, and to give them the opportunity to learn from blind role models. We want them to grow up knowing that blindness will not keep them from living the lives they want.

Our BELL students learned to work with money. They learned to travel. They learned to read and write braille, and they had a wonderful time doing so. One of our students, Ben, the boy digging through the grass for Rex’s keys, was initially nervous about coming. By the end of the program, he was telling his mom every day that he could not wait to go to BELL.

This program, too, would not have happened without significant work from so many people including our coordinator and teacher, whom you heard from earlier today, and also the dozens of volunteers who read to students, taught them, played with them, cooked for them, and raised money to help support the program. Thank you for your belief in blind children. Thank you for supporting that belief with concrete action.

The spirit of giving that informs so much of what we do is humbling, and you can see it everywhere when you look around. It is in the conference calls our senior division held to teach other seniors. It is in the regional student seminars our students helped to plan and put on. It is in the braille agendas you are reading, the speeches you are hearing, and—for that matter—the cookies you’re eating. What we do is only possible because of that generous spirit.

That’s why working with the children in our BELL program means so much to me. I was a lucky kid growing up. The Federation found me early. I met positive, blind role models and teachers when I was their age, and I was better for it. On that August afternoon, as we walked back to our building, large blind hands holding tiny blind hands to walk the children safely across the street, the circle closed, and I was reminded anew. This is why we do what we do, and the world is better for it.

Thank you for giving your time and energy so that others we haven’t even met yet can live better lives. Thank you for working to create a future full of opportunity. Thank you for being a part of the National Federation of the Blind.