Full Transcript
Gabi:
I would love to become a mentor when I’m done with college. I love helping people.
Jeff:
Learning Ally – together, it’s possible.
Abigail:
We have over 80,000 books in our catalogue right now, and they range the gamut of college level textbooks to juvenile literature, and anything in between there.
Jeff:
Helping students reach their potential.
Rachel:
I love working with these students, to watch them grow, you know, start off as freshmen and watch as they’re sort of growing and using some of the tools that they get from the CSP, but also learning for themselves what works and what doesn’t work.
Jeff:
Solutions for blind and visually impaired students.
Gabi:
I think it’s great for any blind or low vision student who is currently in college or getting ready to attend college.
Jeff:
And now please welcome, from Learning Ally, Abigail, Rachel, and Gabi, and from Blind Abilities, Simon Bonenfant. We hope you enjoy.
Rachel:
Just seeing them progress in their skills, and in their journeys, it’s fantastic.
Simon:
Hello everyone on Blind Abilities, this is Simon Bonenfant here, and we have a great podcast lined up for you, and today we’re gonna be talking about Learning Ally. They are a textbook producing company, and they also have a College Success Program, they have a podcast, they have a website, they have a lot of different things that they offer for the blindness community, we’re gonna be talking about a lot of them today. The three people we have on the line with us today, we have Abigail Shaw, and she is the coordinator for the College Success Program, we have Rachel Grider, she is a mentor for the program, and we have Gabi Mendonca, who is a mentee for the program. So let’s start out with you, Abigail, can you please tell us a little bit about Learning Ally, give a little bit of an introduction to the listeners of what you do?
Abigail:
Yeah, thanks for having us, Simon, and excited to talk about Learning Ally and specifically the College success Program. I coordinate the mentorship piece of our program, and as you mentioned, Rachel’s one of our mentors, Gabi’s one of our students, we have right now in May of 2021 we have 27 blind and low vision mentors working with about 110 college students who are blind or low vision all across the country. Our program is completely free of charge, it’s available to students who are about to begin college or in the midst of an undergraduate or graduate program, and they are eligible to use our audiobooks, work with our mentors, access our resources, and be a part of our community.
Simon:
Okay, great. So can you describe to the listeners what types of textbooks that you provide and those types of services and can you kind of differentiate why Learning Ally is better than some of the other services out there, and also kind of give a little bit of a history of it, I know that you started off as the recordings for the blind and dyslexic, and then you moved into Learning Ally, and why you’re better than your competitors?
Abigail:
Yeah, Learning Ally started in 1948 out of the New York Public Library, there was some women that were volunteering and they were very involved in the community, and they had learned that several gentlemen coming back from World War II weren’t able to access the GI Bill, which gave them, you know, free access to education, because they’d been blinded in combat and they couldn’t access textbooks, and so these women started recording books. At that time it was on reel-to-reel tapes in the basement of the public library in Manhattan, and the eventually found a space of their own, and it became known as the Recordings for the Blind, and then as you mentioned we moved into becoming Recordings for the Blind and Dyslexic, or RB&D, and over time our books continued to change with the technologies from reel-to-reels to cassette tapes to CDs, and then in the early 2000s, 2010s, Learning Ally became, we changed our name yet again to Learning Ally because we were doing more than just providing audiobooks. We started to tap into professional development for educators and providing support to families with students that had dyslexia or other learning disabilities, and so that’s what our name remains to be to this day. Our headquarters are based in Princeton, New Jersey, but our staff and specifically with our mentoring program, with the College Success Program, we’re all over the country. So I’m based in Brooklyn, New York, and my colleagues on the College Success Program, Mary Alexander is our director, she’s in Texas, Katie Ottaggio is in the Philadelphia area, and then Katie does a lot of our marketing, and Kristen Witucki, Kristen is our content curator, and we’ve continued to provide audiobooks, all of our audiobooks regardless of if they’re a textbook or if they’re classic literature, but regardless of what type of book it is they’re all produced by human volunteer narrators. So we often are compared to other services like Bookshare, which Bookshare does, you know, great things as well, many of our students use both of the resources, but the only difference is that we have human-read audiobooks versus the synthetic speech, which is what you get with something like Bookshare, and we used to have studios all across the country, but back in 2017 we started shifting to a completely virtual model, so now our audiobooks are recording in closets and studios all around the globe, so people can volunteer with us anywhere that they have access to a microphone and a quiet space, so that’s a bit about our history and where we are. I mentioned, you know, textbooks and classic literature, we have over 80,000 books in our catalogue right now, and they range the gamut of college level textbooks to juvenile literature, and anything in between there, and Learning Ally is beginning to focus more and more on the younger grades, so we are constantly recruiting very youthful narrators that can record books for the earlier grades to help get students excited and engaged with reading, so that’s a little bit about the books and our history.
Simon:
Well, that’s really terrific, I know for me I prefer having a human reader and a human touch that that brings, the expression, all those things that you just cannot get out of a synthetic speech, so that’s really great, and I noticed that you mentioned a lot of things for college students and the younger students, but you also mentioned that you had some classical literatures, so it sounds like that it’s not just for students but even adults who are not in school can sign up and take advantage of this service as well?
Abigail:
That’s right, yeah, the College Success Program is different in that it’s funded through philanthropy and we also receive some funding through state vocational rehabilitation, so it is free to all college students who are blind or low vision regardless of your age or what you’re studying, but if you’re a younger person or an older adult that doesn’t fall into that college category, we do have household memberships, which are for a fee, but you are eligible, and for most, I would say with most youth public schools, schools for the blind, and even some public libraries, there’s often funding, so if that is ever an inhibitor to individuals accessing our books, our customer care team usually has really great insight into, you know, what ways that that cost can be covered if it’s not accessible out of pocket by the individual.
Simon:
Okay. And what is the website that people can go to to find general information about the Learning Ally service?
Abigail:
Yeah, we’re at learningally.org, so l-e-a-r-n-i-n-g-a-l-l-y dot o-r-g.
Simon:
Okay, great. Well, I definitely recommend people to check that out. Now let’s get into the College Success Program more specifically, can you talk a little bit about your background, how did you get into work at the program, and all those things.
Abigail:
Yeah, so I actually started as a mentor, I am blind myself, and I started as a mentor in the fall of 2015, and the program had just been piloted earlier that year, so in the beginning of 2015, and the pilot started after a couple years of research. Learning Ally had worked with a qualitative research company that had followed several students, you know, for a span of time, and they were a mixture of blind, low vision, and some of them also had multiple disabilities, and at that time we thought the results of this research was going to show us how we could make our audio textbooks better, and it turned out that a lot of the findings illustrated that there were bigger obstacles to succeeding in college for these students, such as being English language learners, being nontraditional in age, navigating college in, you know, so many facets of college in terms of transitioning from having an IEP in the public school system to falling under the Americans with Disabilities Act, or ADA, when you move into college, you know, what are those legal rights and what are the differences. Adjusting to the types of technology that you use, you know, some students were finding that using a CCTV met their needs for reading in high school, but once they got to college, the amount of reading exponentially, you know, it’s so much greater, and they had a lot of fatigue, so there were all these other factors that we were finding from this research than just our audiobooks were actually serving these students pretty well, and so Mary Alexander, who I mentioned is our director, she worked with some of our other staff in other parts of Learning Ally to start building this program, and so in 2015 it launched, and it has been a virtual program ever since its inception, which I don’t know if it would be considered a blessing in disguise, but it definitely served us well coming through 2020, we were already prepared, you know, to adapt to, we had been doing it virtually ever since the beginning. The College Success Program had a multi-pronged approach to supporting students, and I touched on a lot of these things already. So when students sign up they have access to the audiobooks, the over 80,000 titles that are available. They can elect to work with one of our mentors, like Rachel, who you’ll hear from in a little bit. They have access to all of our resources and Kristen Witucki, who writes and pulls those together, and the resources are a really great wealth of information, they’re formatted like blog posts and articles and they are intentionally written to, you know, speaking directly to students, since they are at the, you know, they are responsible for their learning and directing their learning, and the resources cover all kinds of things like how to get involved on campus, getting involved with clubs, and balancing your time and school with the social parts and academic parts, because we try to take a holistic approach to working with students and recognize that college is a time of personal growth and discovery, and it’s not just gonna come through the classroom, it comes through relationships you build in clubs, and you know, with your roommates and that kind of thing. To other things we have some career exploration articles, we have just a whole wealth of resources, and we also have a blog. That content is a little- slightly different from the resources, and then lastly we have what we call our community, and that encompasses, like, we have a private Facebook page, we have monthly webinars, and the webinars are open to anyone, you don’t have to be a CSP member, we often have lots of vocational rehabilitation professionals, and educators that join as well, and then we have, twice a week we have meetups over Zoom, and those are just a two hour timeslot where students and mentors can hang out and mingle for part or all of the time, and we have a podcast, so there’s kind of four elements, there’s our audiobooks, our mentorship, our resources, and our community, and that’s what encompasses the program as a whole, and at this point in time, we’re serving just under 1000 students nationwide. As I mentioned we have 27 mentors and there’s about 10, I’d say about 10% of students that are in the program work with a mentor, but we’re always pushing for more students, because we find that that’s the most valuable part of our program, is getting to have that relationship with a mentor and somebody who’s already been through college and can give you advice on their lived experience.
Simon:
Oh, that’s great. And you mentioned how you were able to make a transition in the pandemic very smoothly, and I know that I had heard of you for a number of years, but I started to get a lot of emails and good information from you when the pandemic started and you started doing these webinars and you really started to boost your outreach. How did that come about, that you knew that you had to take it up to that next level, and you really have filled a need throughout the pandemic with these webinars and the podcast, can you kind of talk about how it came about to expand it and give the listeners a little bit of what these webinars are like, what kind of speakers that you have, because I know that I have joined a few of them, and I found them to be very engaging and informative.
Abigail:
There is a couple of factors that contributed to the increase in the content that you probably saw, and the first one is that Katie Atajio, who’s our marketing and engagement manager, she had started working with us in late 2019, and she really brought a lot of her skills and talents and experience with marketing and pushing out, we were starting to push out more newsletters and really doing that marketing piece, and then came the pandemic, and we actually received a lot of feedback from those students and a lot of our mentors with ideas about how could we fill some of these gaps that students were experiencing in not being face to face anymore, and so we did start doing the webinars. Our podcast had actually- we had started working on some of that production prior to the pandemic as well, and have carried on, so those were kind of Katie being a very positive force, and the pandemic being something unexpected but in the end was also a, we made lemonade out of lemons if you will, but those were kind of the two forces that collided for us to up our content, and as far as the webinar subject matter, there have been a whole plethora of speakers and topics, all of our past webinars live on our YouTube channel, so anyone after hearing this you’re welcome to go explore more. We had one on guide dogs, and the topic was, you know, considering if a guide dog would fit in with your lifestyle, and we had one of our mentors, Jimmy
Beam from Tennessee, he has a dog from the Seeing Eye, and then we had a staff person from Guide Dogs for the Blind out in California, they just had a conversation about working with a guide dog and what does it look like and would it be- they kind of worked through some questions that students should ask themselves, and then we’ve also had picking apps for college, and that was at the beginning of last school year, so some of our mentors both blind and low vision shared apps that they like to use for academic and navigation and you know, all the apps that they like. We’ve had some other webinars on internships, and getting work experience while you’re in college. Yeah, there’s many, many others, but that gives you a good idea.
Simon:
Yeah, that’s perfect. That’s great. You recently rebranded your website to have a lot of new changes and new things on there, can you talk about the new changes and I’m assuming that people can go to that website to find all the resources like the podcast and YouTube channel, can you give that web address, where to direct them, and what they can find?
Abigail:
Yeah, so we did create a new website and there was a couple of reasons why. We had formerly been using a learning management system to house all the resources I was talking about, and we just weren’t happy with a lot of the systems on the market, so we created our own! So you can find our new website at collegesuccessbvi, so college success bravo victor indigo.org, and once you’re there, we’ve done a lot of testing to ensure that it’s screen reader compatible and works well for those who are using screen magnification or color inversion, and we’re always happy for feedback as well, but once you’re there you can find links to the resources, you can sign up, you can see all of our events, the meetups that I mentioned that take place twice a week, they’re up there, we do those on Zoom, so you can access the link there, and you can also link out to all of our social channels through the website as well, so collegesuccessbvi.org is our new website.
Simon:
Okay, and can you give the name of your podcast and your YouTube, I’m assuming that for the podcast people can go into their podcast app of choice and look you up, but can you give the name and also for YouTube?
Abigail:
Right now we’re only on iTunes podcast and YouTube, we hope to make it onto Google Play and Spotify and all the other places but right now it’s just those two spots. If you search for College Knowledge in iTunes that’s where you’ll find us there.
Simon:
And what about social media, where can people find you on there?
Abigail:
Yeah, we’re on Twitter, we do have a private Facebook page for students, but we also have a publicly facing Facebook page, and so Twitter and Facebook are the other two places you can search for us.
Simon:
Okay, great, and you can get there from the website?
Abigail:
Yes you can!
Simon:
Great, so that’s another reason for listeners to go to the website and check it out and get some informational resources as well. Well, thank you Abigail, now let’s turn it over to Rachel, we have Rachel Grider, Rachel, how’re you doing today?
Rachel:
I’m doing great, how’re you doing?
Simon:
I’m doing very well, thank you. Can you tell us a little bit about your background? I know that you are blind yourself, can you talk about your background, give a little brief history of your life.
Rachel:
I went to college in a- well, I graduated high school 2007, so I started college at California State University, Stanislaus, and I graduated with a degree in music in 2011, and then I did my Masters Degree in Baltimore, Maryland, at Peabody Conservatory, and I got my degrees in voice performance and music theory pedagogy, and I graduated from there in 2013. Then I moved back here to California, and I started teaching voice, and eventually started working at a music academy here in Modesto, California, and started working- also working at Learning Ally in 2017.
Simon:
Okay, great! I’m glad that you’re in the music field, I’m in the music field as well, so I definitely know that area of expertise, definitely. Now I know you were talking at the beginning before we started recording here, I had asked you if you were in the College Success Program when you were in college and you told me that it wasn’t around back then, but can you talk about some of the struggles that you have had in college and how the program may have helped you to overcome that, just the mentorship and the expertise that you could have gotten in that situation.
Rachel:
That’s a great question, and what comes to mind for me, as far as the biggest struggle I had as a blind college student, was really being comfortable with my identity as a blind person. I didn’t really like to be associated, or thought of as blind, and sometimes that caused me to not ask for some of the accommodations that I needed, so I, you know, struggled with that. So I think if I had had the College Success Program around at that time, I’d like to think I would have utilized it, I should have utilized it, and it would have helped me, you know, if I had had a mentor, a strong blind person that I could look up to and who could show me that yes, it’s okay to be blind, and yes, it’s okay to ask for these accommodations, and it’s okay to get help sometimes with things that are needed because, you know, something isn’t accessible, and it’s okay to tell a professor that you need something sent in another format because what they sent isn’t accessible, I think that would have helped me a lot.
Simon:
Yeah, that’s really terrific, having the ability to talk to blind role models who have been there, done that as they say, can be really, really helpful, so that’s great. Can you describe how you got into the College Success Program in terms of being a mentor, and kind of take us through what you do in the mentor role in terms of what you talk to your student about and how often do you talk to your student, and all that stuff.
Rachel:
So as I said before, I got involved in 2017, I was told about the program from a friend of mine from the NFB. I had honestly been feeling somewhat unfulfilled in my job before that, because I had been thinking about how cool it would be to have a job working with blind people, and I just, you know, had really wanted that, and then I heard about this opportunity, and I thought oh, this sounds interesting. I had never had much contact, or actually any contact I don’t think, with Learning Ally before, so I, you know, went ahead and applied, and became a mentor for Learning Ally, in addition to, you know, teaching music, which was great, and it has been really awesome. I love to be able to pay forward some of the advice and the tools that have helped me, and also sharing my own experiences as a college student to help other students. Right now I actually have eight mentees, and some of them I meet with once a week, some of them I meet with once a month, some of them I meet with once every two weeks, some of them I just meet with as needed, like it’s really up to, and I always tell them it’s up to them how much they want to talk with me, and if I don’t hear from them for a while I’ll send them a text or you know, just see how they’re doing, and I’ll forward them information when I come across things that might apply to them. I love working with these students because it’s super rewarding, especially for the ones that I’ve had for a long time, like to watch them grow, you know, start off as freshmen and watch as they’re sort of growing and coming into their own more, and using some of the tools that they get from the CSP, but also, you know, learning for themselves what works and what doesn’t work, and just seeing them progress in their skills and in their journeys, it’s fantastic, and I have to say, I think I learn as much from my mentees as they learn from me. I probably learn more from them. For example, Gabi here, when we talk, I feel like a lot of times what we’re talking about is- it’s almost like we’re just hanging out, you know, right? And we’ll talk about her school and her stuff, her experiences as a student, but then we’ll also talk about other things, and she’s given me a lot of great information about recording for my YouTube channel and all these other things. We’ll share technology secrets and just cool stuff like that, so really it goes both ways and it’s awesome, and as far as some of the things that I do talk about with my students, just like Abigail said, we take a very holistic approach to college experiences, and in my opinion the social aspect, living skills, advocacy, like all of those things are just as important as the academics, so we talk about all of it. We talk about academics, I usually start by asking my students, you know, how their week was, or however long it’s been since I’ve talked to them, how it’s gone, to report on their progress, on their goals, you know, we’ve set some goals in the beginning of the semester usually, and we’ll talk about the progress they’ve made on those goals. So we’ll talk about academics, we’ll talk about socializing, we’ll talk about technology, mobility, anything. Whatever, really, it’s kind of whatever they have questions about, whatever they want to talk about. Yeah.
Simon:
Yeah, that’s terrific. Now let’s go to Gabi. Now, for those who may remember, who have listened to Blind Abilities for a long time, Gabi has been on a few times, so Gabi, you are definitely a friend of Blind Abilities, I would say. You’ve been on with Jeff, and you were also on the college panel discussion back in March, so for those who listened to that you’ll remember Gabi. Gabi, how’re you doing?
Gabi:
I’m doing good, how’re you?
Simon:
Good, good, doing well. So you are a mentee, or student, in the College Success Program, can you share a little bit of your journey, your experience with college, and how you got into the College Success Program and what it has helped you with?
Gabi:
My journey in college was kind of difficult, there’s definitely parts of it that I feel like were harder than others, and so when in those cases I really had to turn to the resources that were available to me, because one, I wanted to know if there was somebody else who was out there who would be able to assist me in any of the challenges that might come up and just give me advice on how to fix things and anything like that, and so I was already using Learning Ally previously, and so when I found out about the CSP mentorship program, I signed up to become a mentee right away, and I started meeting with the mentor that I had at the time like every other week, and we would talk about social skills, we would talk about advocacy, lack of accessibility, and how to kind of fix those issues. I think it’s really been a great help for me because, mostly during this pandemic especially I want to say, I’ve been able to connect with other students through the meetups, and we’ve become friends, and we talk outside of the meetups as well, you know, we all have a group chat that we’re in and we kind of get to share not just similar ideas and things like that, but we also get to talk about issues in college and if any of us know how to fix those things that may come up, and in terms of how the mentorship has helped me, I love meeting with Rachel because we talk so much about literally anything, like she mentioned previously, we go from talking about school to talking about internships to talking about things I like to do outside of school, my interests, being adventurous, people, and that’s really shown me that it doesn’t matter that you can’t see, the only thing that matters is that, like, you are someone who wants to step outside of their comfort zone, and I do love trying new things, so me and Rachel talk about that all the time, and it’s definitely helped me, especially from two semesters ago, where we’re in the pandemic but also there was so many issues that came up with accessibility and so having these meetups, meeting with Rachel, talking to the other students, that kind of helped me to learn how to figure out how to fix those issues.
Simon:
Yes, and I know we touched on this a lot in the college panel discussion, but what kind of challenges have you been faced with in your academics and college, or in any sort of situation, and have you noticed that the program has really helped you in that way?
Gabi:
The challenges that I’ve been faced with in college would have to be lack of accessibility. From day one, I tried to work with the faculty to you know, make the campus more accessible, not just for myself, but for any other blind, low vision student that may attend in the future, and you know, it definitely worked for a while, but I feel like there was still room for improvement, and I feel like this mentorship helped because, again, it all goes back to learning how to advocate more, or talking about issues that may come up, and so I’m really appreciative of using this program, and I think it’s great for any blind or low vision student who is currently in college, or getting ready to attend college.
Simon:
Oh, great. So do you think that you’re gonna become a mentor when you get out of college?
Gabi:
I would love to become a mentor when I’m done with college. I love helping people, so I feel like it would be a great thing to do.
Simon:
Good, good. Well, I know just from the time that we’ve talked during that college panel, I know you definitely qualify, so that is definitely good. You have a lot of wisdom and insight, so you’re on the right path there.
Gabi:
Thank you.
Simon:
Well, I think there’s a really important theme here that we’ve heard throughout the podcast, folks, and that is just giving back and paying it forward from all of the experiences that we all have had, and that’s really important in the blindness community, to learn from each other, network, and help each other along the way, and pay it forward as we heard. So that’s terrific. Abigail, just to put it back to you real quick as we wind up here, can people go onto the website to sign up for either being a mentor or mentee, is that something that you can do on the website as well and what is the application like?
Abigail:
Yeah, if you’re a student and you want to sign up, go to our collegesuccessbvi.org, you can create an account, it’s pretty painless, there’s just some basic demographic information like, you know, you’ll need to provide an email, and where you live, what school you’re attending or that you’re planning to attend, and then you will have to provide some certification that you are blind or low vision, and there’s a couple ways you can do that. If you have a Bookshare account you can provide that, a letter from an eye doctor, or your commission counselor, services for the blind counselor, there’s a couple ways. If you would like to become a mentor, it is a part-time paid position, and we do interview and you know, recruit candidates, so if you’re interested in that you would reach out to me directly. My email is afshaw@learningally.org, and so you can email me. We have not started recruiting for next year, but if anyone ever has interest you can reach out to me, I’m happy to share a description and keep your name on the list if you are interested and eligible, and if you have any general questions you can reach us at csp@learningally.org. And then I mentioned the social channel on Twitter, we’re @learningallybvi, same on Facebook, Learning Ally BVI, and the College Success Program on YouTube, and then you can search for College Knowledge in iTunes for our podcast.
Simon:
Okay, great, and I know that you have a mailing list that you alert people of the webinars and things like that, I’m guessing that if somebody wanted to sign up for that email, they can send you an email on that?
Abigail:
Mm-hm, you can email me directly or the csp@learningally.org.
Simon:
Okay. And I’m just curious to know, because I know that the college textbooks can be very specialized, and a lot of specialized things, if there is a textbook that a student needs that is not available in the catalogue, is there an ability for them to request that textbooks be produced?
Abigail:
Yes, if you go to our learningally.org webpage, there is a link where you can, I think it’s either labelled as book suggestion or book request. We cannot guarantee that every request will be produced, just because of- we are working with human narrators and there is a lot of requests that we get from both individuals and educators, and we have to consider how many people will a book be able to serve in the long run. We have to kind of weigh the cost and benefits, but you can submit a request that way, and there’s also a toll free number if you go to learningally.org, our toll free number is listed there, so you can reach out to customer care if you have any additional questions about memberships or if you’re having trouble finding a textbook, Mary McLaughlin is our wonderful, wonderful customer care person, and she fields about 90% of the calls that come through, so if you’re blind or low vision, you will more than likely get Ms. Mary, and she’ll be happy to assist.
Simon:
Okay, great! Well, I strongly encourage listeners to go to the website, sign up for the program, the work that Learning Ally does is really, really fantastic, and at the time of this recording, we’re getting into June, the start of college or the beginning of a new semester is gonna be coming up in a few short months, I know that I’m going into college coming up this fall, so I’m definitely going to sign up myself, and really network and tap into these wonderful resources. I thank you for coming, Abigail, Rachel, and Gabi, thank you very much for taking your time and coming and being great ambassadors for Learning Ally, you really are good at the work that you do, and we hope that you listeners find this very informative and educational. Good luck to all that are starting college next year, and finishing this year, and congratulations, and thank you very much all.
Abigail:
Thank you Simon.
Gabi:
Thank you Simon.
Rachel:
Thank you so much, Simon.
Simon:
Thank you.
Jeff:
Such a great interview. Thank you Abigail Shaw, Rachel Grider, and Gabi Mendonca. And Simon, great job as always, and for more podcasts with a blindness perspective, check us out on the web at www.blindabilities.com, on Twitter @BlindAbilities, and download the free Blind Abilities app from the app store and Google Play store. That’s two words, Blind Abilities. And you can subscribe to the Blind Abilities podcast on any of your podcatchers of choice. Just search for Blind Abilities, yes, that’s two words, Blind Abilities, and stay up with the latest podcasts from the Blind Abilities team. And if you have any questions, want to leave some feedback or just want to say hi, you can give us a call at 612-367-6093. We’d love to hear from you. And from all of us here at Blind Abilities, to you, your family, and friends, stay well and stay strong. I want to thank you for listening, hope you enjoyed, and until next time, bye-bye.
[Music] [Transition noise] -When we share
-What we see
-Through each other’s eyes…
[Multiple voices overlapping, in unison, to form a single sentence]
…We can then begin to bridge the gap between the limited expectations, and the realities of Blind Abilities.
Contact Your State Services
If you reside in Minnesota, and you would like to know more about Transition Services from State Services contact Transition Coordinator Sheila Koenig by email or contact her via phone at 651-539-2361.
Contact:
You can follow us on Twitter @BlindAbilities
On the web at www.BlindAbilities.com
Send us an email
Get the Free Blind Abilities App on the App Storeand Google Play Store.
Check out the Blind Abilities Communityon Facebook, the Blind Abilities Page, and the Career Resources for the Blind and Visually Impaired group