Audio Description:
Live life you want. Nobody can stop you. Shoot for the sun, and break on through.
The following message is brought to you by Mark Riccobono, President National Federation of the Blind, live the life you want.
You can live the life you want. Yes, we know the truth.
Mark Riccobono:
Greetings fellow Federationists. Today is Tuesday, December 30th, 2025, and this is Presidential Release Number 556, the first release of 2026. So let me say happy New Year and happy Braille month since January four is World Braille Day.
I am recording this release just before the new year because we have a lot to get done to make sure we get this release out and to all of the chapters in January and also the first week of January will be quite busy for me, especially because I have to go to India to represent the Federation at the Worl Blind Union officers meeting.
So January is already going to be taking off with lots of Federation work around the world. And of course we have our gathering that will happen at the end of January, which I will talk about in a moment, but I do want to extend my hope that the holiday season was relaxing and joyous for all Federation members.
I do want to start with some Federation family notes, and it's always nice to start the year with a joyous note that we hadn't gotten on the release in 2025. And so I want to share the joyous news that Heather Guy and Lindsay Davis got married on October 25th, 2025. Heather serves as the president of the NFB of Maryland's Eastern Shore chapter.
And Mrs. And Mr. Davis will be spending their first Valentine's Day as a married couple, hosting hundreds of their Federation family friends at the NFB of Maryland Convention on the Eastern Shore.
So that will be a great opportunity for us to wish them well, but let me on this release send best wishes and many decades of love to the happy couple, the newest in the Federation family. I do have a few deaths to share with you on this release as we begin the year.
And the first also comes from Maryland, where we learned of the passing of Sharon McBride on November 23rd, 2025 at the age of 74. Sharon was an early member of the NFB of Maryland's National Harbor Chapter, which was recently reorganized.
From Mississippi, LaShawna Fant shares the sad news that on Friday, December 5th, 2025, Minister Thomas Williamson passed away. He helped out with many things, including helping many blind people with their technology needs.
He was a member of the Jackson chapter and the affiliate for many years. And finally, from Idaho, I regret to have to share with you that Sandy Streeter passed away on December 17th, following a short battle with cancer.
Sandy was first vice president of the affiliate and president of the Snake River Valley Chapter of the NFB of Idaho. She was dedicated to the Federation and contributed in many, many ways. Sandy and her late husband, Larry, lived the Federation philosophy and built in every place they lived.
They lived in six different states over the years. And I know that our Federation family in Idaho will miss Sandy's presence, as will many around the country. Please keep these Federationists and really all of those we lost in 2025 in your thoughts and prayers as we go into this new year.
Now, as we launch into the new year, of course, it's a great time to think about membership. Membership is the foundation of our organization and our work together. January is the time when a lot of chapters begin collecting their dues for the new membership year.
Actually, in Baltimore, our chapter began collecting 2026 dues a number of months ago to get ahead of the curve. So I do encourage that, but I also want to remind chapters that you should, as quickly as possible, update your membership rosters online so that our central database is up to date.
And I do encourage members to pay your dues for 2026 so we can continue to send you the latest information for members so that you continue to have access to member benefits and we can plug you into all of the great things that are going to happen in this year and beyond.
It is an opportunity also to remind you to go in and check out your member profile and maybe check out some of those exclusive member benefits that we've worked out for Federation members. One example is our relationship with AIRA, where Federation members get the deepest discount available on an AIRA membership.
You can get an additional discount on your Bookshare membership an exclusive for Federation members. And recently we announced a relationship with ElevenLabs and you can find that information on your member profile. All of these things are available to you, and I do encourage you to take advantage of them.
I also want to remind you that members besides being the foundation of the organization really helped to power what we do in so many different ways. One of those is to write your stories for our publications. One example being the Braille Monitor.
Your stories help to bring color and definition to the things that we're working on, to the problems that we face, and to give hope and inspiration to other blind people, newly blind or otherwise, where you are pushing the edges of what we might have perceived was possible.
Writing articles, sharing your stories in the Braille Monitor in our podcast, in other ways, really important way for you to contribute to the movement. And this is also my opportunity to remind you that this is your organization as much as it's mine. I need your ideas about what we should be doing, what our priorities should be, what things should we be focusing on?
How should we be doing it? And to consider bringing some of your priorities to the National Convention through resolutions, but definitely through sharing your ideas with me. You can always reach me at my email address, Office of thePresident, all one word at nfb.org. And I certainly hope that we'll have an opportunity to talk about your ideas.
The ideas of members, the thought patterns that members share with the leadership, the engagement and the back and forth is one of the important elements to keeping our organization strong and vibrant and current.
And it reminds me that it's the ideas of the community of wisdom that we have that really fuels our ability to make a difference for blind people all over the country. And if you're like me, you're a member because you believe that working together, we can advance the cause of blind people in new and dynamic ways.
And I believe that 2026 truly will be one of our strongest years yet for that. And one of the ways we're going to start the year by doing that is, of course, our Washington Seminar, which is now just four weeks away. Hard to believe. It's going to be coming up very quickly this year.
And many of you will be traveling to the Washington Seminar to be part of our work on the Hill, but I also want everyone hearing this release to know that you play an important role in helping to advance our legislative priorities.
Now, before I talk about those real briefly, let me just say that a lot of people might say, "Oh, Congress, they don't do anything. It's really, we should just give up and stop trying to get bills passed. We haven't gotten a bill passed in many years." Well, the fact of the matter is, if we stop bringing our voice, our priorities to Congress, nobody in Congress is going to be talking about blind people or very few people will.
The fact that we continue to show up helps keep our concerns, our issues, and our organization front of mind with the people in power. And that is an important and critical factor in our long-term success.
Yep, we haven't gotten a major bill passed in a number of years, but we do continue to make a significant impression on those in power, and that has helped our cause in many ways, especially for keeping bad bills from coming before Congress. So it's really important that we do continue to show up.
And in fact, Congress now expects us to show up. For those of you who are not able to come to Washington and maybe having someone else from your chapter represent you at our Washington Seminar, you still can make a huge difference.
Your calls, your emails showing up at local meetings of your members of Congress being active in activities, talking to people about our legislative priorities and why they matter.
All of that helps in a significant way to support what we're doing. So all of us, whether you're coming to the Washington seminar or not, need to understand the issues and why they're important. Now, many of you have heard me say many times that we have many more issues than the ones we bring to our Washington Seminar.
Our national board carefully calculates which ones we should bring to our concentrated effort because we believe that that will have the best opportunity to move our agenda forward. It's really important that our chapters talk about these issues, why they're important, answer questions about them.
And if you have more questions from your chapter, please reach out to our advocacy and policy group to get those questions answered. I'm going to talk real briefly about our three issues for 2026 at our Washington seminar. You can find all of this information at nfb.org/washington-seminar.
The first priority is protecting meaningful programs of education, employment, and independent living for blind people. These programs make a difference in local communities, but they're managed and governed by the federal government, and we need to make sure that our champions in Congress continue to protect them.
The second one is the Access Technology Affordability Act. The bill that we have come very close to passing a number of times has bipartisan support, which is really critical and will put real resources back into the hands of blind people to get the technology needed, whether we're using rehabilitation services or other programs, this will allow blind people better control of buying home-based technology to use to seek employment or education.
And finally, is the Blind Americans Return to Work Act, a bill that we engineered to make significant improvements in the Social Security Disability program, specifically, and especially to eliminate the earnings cliff, which is a disincentive to many blind people advancing in the workforce.
Now, we're making great progress on this already, and you may have gotten an email from Social Security announcing that Commissioner Frank Bisignano came to our national office to talk with me about our work, our concerns with Social Security as a follow-up to his presentation at our national convention last summer.
And he has met with our lead sponsor, Pete Sessions, and has urged the ... Well, I guess you would say he's told the Congressman that the Social Security Administration is ready and willing to implement this law and the changes if it goes into effect. It's a very good sign for us.
We're lining up all the right people. And again, it's because of the grassroots work that members have done across the country. Now, these are three priorities, three big ones that we're bringing into 2026. We have some others that are very important and will continue to be important.
Also, this year, we will see the Title II ADA web digital regulations go into effect in April. There have been some efforts to consider rolling those back, but we continue to push hard to make sure those go into effect, and that will certainly be on our agenda in mid-year once those standards do go into effect.
So there's a lot to do besides the person to person connections that we make in the National Federation of the Blind that make all the difference. I encourage our chapters to get up to speed, talk about these bills, talk about why they're important, and talk about what you can do locally to help get them passed.
Now, one other thing I want to bring to our chapters this month is to prioritize making sure each and every one of our members knows about our publications and not just knows about them, but really can get connected with them in the way that we want.
Our Braille Monitor, our podcasts, our emails, please make sure that every member in your chapter has a way to get connected with our current literature and our historical literature. And if you can do that at the local level, make sure they get signed up for the publications they want. That will make a big difference.
And I do, again, encourage chapters to think about using our Walking Alone and Watching Together podcast to spark conversations in the chapter about our history and what it means for our future. I encourage all of you out there to consider writing for the Braille Monitor again as your contributions do make a big difference.
Now, I promised you last year that on this release, I would pick up with thanking some of our chapters who over the past few months, really since our national convention, have joined our pre-authorized contribution program.
And let me thank all of you who contribute to the PAC Plan. It does make a difference in our finances. It helps give us a stable base, and those numbers really help us go to other people to get support when it shows that our members are supporting the work that we do.
So over the last six months, we've had a number of affiliates and chapters sign up for the PAC program. So let me begin by thanking the NFB of Georgia, Atlanta Metropolitan Chapter, along with the NFB of Michigan, the NFB of Arkansas' Northwest Arkansas chapter, as well as the NEA chapter, which I assume might be the Northeast Arkansas chapter, but my notes just say NEA.
From the NFB of Wisconsin, we want to thank our At Large Badger chapter, as well as the Brown County chapter for joining the PAC Plan. From the NFB of Missouri, welcome the Ivanhoe chapter to the PAC Plan.
From the NFB of North Carolina, we are pleased to have the Alamance County chapter. From the NFB of Colorado, we have the downtown COS chapter. I suspect that means Colorado Springs. From the NFB of Nebraska, we want to welcome our at large chapter to the PAC Plan.
And from the NFB of Kansas, we have our South Central chapter from the NFB of Washington, the Clallum County chapter, and finally, welcome the NFB of Ohio Diabetes Action Network to our pre-authorized contribution program.
Thank you so much for your ongoing contributions to our organization, to all of our chapters, affiliates and members who have been contributing, some of whom have been contributing now for 50 years, which is really exciting.
I also want to welcome a new member to our Dream Makers Circle. This is the program we have where members and friends of the Organized Blind Movement can make an end of life gift commitment to the Federation makes a big difference to us in the long run.
And I want to thank and welcome Judy Sanders from Minneapolis, Minnesota for being the latest Dream Maker Circle contributor to come on board. You will recognize that Judy is also one of our previous Jacobus Tenbrook Award winners, longtime member in our movement, and we appreciate Judy's commitment to our organization through our Dream Maker Circle.
That is what I have to share with you on this first release of 2026. Looking forward to ringing in the new year since I'm not there yet, but I hope that you had a great ringing in of the new year and that you have made some strong commitments to yourself and to our organization for this year.
I do look forward to hearing more from some members that I haven't heard from in recent times. So again, office of the president at nfb.org. I hope to come across you at our Washington Seminar or at our national convention or at one of our state conventions or other events.
Otherwise, please know that I'm here working alongside you to advance our mission in 2026, and I look forward to hearing your ideas, thoughts, dreams, hopes for our movement this year. Now, in closing, let me give you some of the customary endings.
What New Year's resolution should a basketball player never make? Well, that's to travel more, of course.
Where can you find comedians at a New Year's Eve party? Well, in the punchline.
And finally, what happened to the person who stole a calendar on New Year's Eve? Well, they got 12 months.
Let's go build the National Federation of the Blind.
Audio Description:
The preceding message was brought to you by Mark Riccobono, President, National Federation of the Blind, 410-659-9314, [email protected]. Follow President Riccobono on Mastodon. Just search for @[email protected]. Let's go build the National Federation of the Blind.