This is being provided in a rough-draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings.
MARK RICCOBONO: Greetings, fellow Federationists, today is Tuesday, January 7, 2025, and this is Presidential Release live number 48 -- hard to believe. Happy new year, everyone. It's great to be back together with you, and let me say, happy World Braille Day. I do recognize that technically World Braille Day was January 4th, but I mean, we feel in the National Federation of the Blind that one day is really not sufficient for braille, and so we celebrate braille, well, not just all month -- all year long!
So this is, technically, our World Braille Day edition of the Presidential Release, and it's great to be back with everybody, and really looking forward to an exciting year ahead.
We will come back to braille and talk a little bit about braille and some interesting things, but I want to jump into a couple of other things looking ahead at 2025.
And if we're going to look ahead at 2025, of course, we have to plan for our National Convention, which will be coming up in New Orleans from July 8th to July 13, 2025. You will want to be there this summer!
I want to start, though, by saying that our hearts go out to all of the people of New Orleans for the tragic terrorist attack that happened on Bourbon Street on New Year's Day. Fortunate that none of our Federation family were directly impacted, but obviously for the citizens of New Orleans who were tremendous, tremendous hosts to us for our 2022 Convention, a significant impact on and horrible experience.
So our hearts go out to them. We are anticipating a gracious and wonderful reception again in New Orleans this summer, and so we're really looking forward to returning and showing our solidarity to the people of New Orleans by bringing our Federation family, our love, and of course our stomachs, because you gotta get ready to eat good food in New Orleans. Really looking forward to that.
We are thankful that no one in our Federation family was directly impacted. If we learn differently or learn of ways you can help, we will share that information. Now, if you're tuned in, maybe for the first time, and you're like, well, what's this Convention about? Well, you should know that the Convention of the National Federation of the Blind is the supreme authority of our movement. This is the time when all the affiliates come together, and the Convention serves as the supreme governing body of the NFB.
It's also our family reunion. Whether you're a first timer or a 50 timer, you will find friends and family very quickly there in and amongst the Convention experience. So I do encourage you to make your way to the Convention. Our Convention hotel will again be the Marriott New Orleans as our headquarters hotel, and our overflow hotel will be the Sheraton across the street. While most of the meetings will be taking place in the Marriott, our exhibit hall and Independence Market will again be across the street in the Sheraton.
You can reserve your room now, and I'm going to give you this information, but it is also found in the Braille Monitor, in our convention announcement.
So if you missed something, you can go to the website, which I'm going to give you in a minute as well. To call the Marriott to reserve your room, the number is 888-236-2427. The number for the Sheraton is 855-516-1090. And when you book your room, simply ask for the National Federation of the Blind 2025 Convention block -- pretty easy -- and you can get a room. I will not go through all of the details about the room rates and that sort of thing again. That is in the Braille Monitor, or everything convention all of the time you can find at nfb.org/convention. Very easy!
Now, the cost of preregistration before convention, or online registration, as we sometimes say, the cost is 25 dollars, and the cost for the banquet is 80 dollars. Don't need to worry about that right now because registration is not open! We will let you know when it is. But I wanted to let you know about that.
And I think in particular, significant, that the registration cost continues to be 25 dollars. You know, our convention costs do continue to go up in terms of what it takes for us to operate the convention, for us to have staff there, for us to take care of all of the AV and other things. 25 dollars really doesn't even come close to covering anywhere near what it costs the Federation to operate the Convention. And our goal there is to keep the cost as low as possible. I know some people say "80 dollars to attend the banquet?!" You know, this is the cost of hotels these days and doing business with hotels.
Again, the Federation is not making money on this! But the banquet is an important opportunity for us to come together and close our Convention. And so I do encourage you to plan to be with us at the banquet. And the banquet meal in New Orleans, we know will be great. It was great last time. We do everything we can to keep the Convention cost reasonable, which is why we also want you to start planning for the Convention now so you can have a great experience.
The Convention happens because hundreds of members volunteer to be part of our Convention operations team. And one of the things we've done this year on our convention page is we've listed details about the volunteer opportunities for members to participate in the Convention operation. Now, this isn't really new. These opportunities have been there.
But we've included them on the convention page as well as a form that you can fill out to express your interest. You can also always talk to your affiliate president, and many affiliates will ask you to serve in certain capacities at the Convention, especially if you're getting funding from the affiliate to do so.
Just some examples of ways you can help out at the Convention -- you can be a Convention ambassador and help with making sure that the Convention is a welcoming and positive experience for all who attend, and that people are able to navigate to the places they want to, especially early in the Convention. You can serve in our Independence Market, helping to demonstrate various aids and appliances that are for sale there. That's a way that many members help out. We have brought back again from last year our Convention Ally Network, a great way to help facilitate participation in the convention and support those who may feel uncomfortable based on the laws of the particular jurisdiction we're going to.
You can serve as a support service provider to an individual member who is Deafblind and help provide access that way.
You can help provide Spanish interpretation during the convention. There are literally dozens of other ways you can volunteer in and around the convention.
I encourage you to do so. It helped me meet a lot of people and get to know a lot about the fact that this organization happens because of us, the members, not because someone's doing it for us.
So please express your interest, get involved, and for those of you that are considering coming to the Convention for the very first time, I do encourage you to go to the website and read our First Timer's Guide to the Convention, of course, remind you that you can also apply for a first timer's scholarship from our Kenneth Jernigan Fund, and I know that members of your chapter or affiliate would love to talk to you about the Convention experience and mentor you through that. If you're a little bit nervous about it, don't worry. We all were first timers once.
And we want chapters to be talking about the Convention, and let's see if we can break a record in New Orleans this summer. We know that it's going to be a while before we have another New Orleans convention, so let's take advantage of that. Now, I want to talk a little bit about the budget situation of the Federation. I did talk about this some on our recorded release that you'll hear at chapter meetings.
But I thought it was important to bring it here to this live event as well. Last year, about this time, I shared with you that the board of directors had approved the deficit budget for the organization, and I talked about that also at the Convention last year.
The good news is, my speculation about the deficit budget, with end of life gifts that we got from individuals, so our bequests, I think, was a record year for the Federation.
However, going into 2025, we're still facing a pretty significant budget shortfall.
And so we are taking steps to tighten our belts and make sure that we are using every Federation dollar to maximum benefit. I wanted to emphasize that here, because each member can do your part. Of course we need you help people find ways to donate to the movement, besides yourself, reach out to people and ask. We know people give because they are asked.
But you can also help us look for opportunities to save dollars. The example I like to give is the Braille Monitor. Maybe you've been getting the Monitor on a flash drive for a long time, but you've migrated to listening to it via podcast, or maybe you download it on Newsline or something else, but you're still getting that flash drive in the mail, and you just haven't gotten around to letting us know that you don't need the flash drive anymore.
Those flash drives, they do cost money. They do take effort to put the content on there. That's one simple way that you might be able to help. Now, if you need the flash drive, you want the flash drive, get it. Go for it. But if you're also in a position, if you're getting it, to return them to us so that we can recycle it, that also helps us to save money, so we don't have to buy them quite as often. There may be other ways that you can find to help us save resources.
You know, we were planning for an event that's happening later this winter, and someone said, you know, I'd really like to just go ahead and buy my own plane ticket to save the organization some money. Great. Every dollar helps. Our staff are working hard on this as well, making sure that we're using every dollar appropriately, that we're finding ways to lower our expenses and bring in new dollars. I have to say that our staff does an exceptional job at this already, and really, the situation we're facing has more to do with trends in fundraising and the economics' up and downs that happen.
So I am asking you to do your part. I will be working hard on this. That's my commitment that I've ahead to the National Board, is to make sure that we can significantly right-size our budget. One of the things that I have heard some people say about our Federation is, well, you know, we talk about the investments that we have and, you know, the Federation is sitting on a lot of investments. You know, we are fortunate that over a number of years, we have built a pretty good base of investment assets.
But when you look at that, those assets, there's a couple of things to consider. One is that those assets really are just barely -- and maybe not even enough -- to get us through one year of operations. So if we lost all of our other income streams and we spent all of those investment dollars, we could do that for one year, and then we'd be broke. And of course we don't want to do that.
Secondly, some of those funds are restricted to certain purposes, like our Bolotin Awards. We've taken those funds as a donation, and we have to use them for certain purposes. Our scholarship program is supported through a number of funds, which we can spend on scholarships, but not in other ways. So while we are fortunate to have a lot of discretionary dollars in our investment accounts, and we continue to steward those the best we can, they would not get us through more than a year of operation, which is why we need to take these steps.
So your ideas about what more we can do, how we can do it better, how we can be more efficient, are welcome, and I'd encourage you to write to me at [email protected] if you have thoughts about what we can do, how we can do it, what programs we should be trying to double down on even in this time of trying to tighten our belts.
Having said that, we're not slowing down by any means in the Federation, and we have a very aggressive agenda for 2025, and we're looking forward to talking about that and executing on that in the next few months. I do want to come back to Braille. As I said, it's not just a day for us. Braille is an important tool of independence, and we know that there are a lot of issues out there in terms of people getting access to training and educational opportunities to learn Braille.
But we also know that braille opens up so many areas of understanding and innovation for blind people, and in fact, we have used braille as blind people as an inspiration for other innovations in our life. You will find Braille and our use of braille to be very innovative in the National Federation of the Blind, and one of the examples of that is our national headquarters here in Baltimore.
And we got to thinking about braille, and all of the rich places you might find braille here around our building. So Oriana Riccobono recently gave a tour to a young blind person in our Maryland affiliate to see some of the places they could discover braille in our building, and I thought I'd share that video with you to celebrate World Braille Day.
(Video beginning)
ORIANA: Welcome to the National Federation of the Blind. Let's go discover some Braille.
AD: Oriana and Archer enter the Jernigan Institute and approach the Wall of Honor. There are the names in braille of the people who donated to build this building, and there's print on this wall. Archer reading a braille plaque: "Building our future with our own hands". Oriana and Arch er exit the elevator into the atrium.
ORIANA: Here we have a statue of Dr. Jernigan at his real height. There's some braille text here if you want to feel it. Archer, how do you feel about having braille on statues?
ARCHER: I think it's cool.
ORIANA: We have pictures over here with plaques underneath with braille on it if you want to feel, Archer.
AD: Archer explores pictures of NFB presidents.
MARK RICCOBONO: I have a Baltimore Orioles jersey that has braille on here if you want to touch it.
ARCHER: I've never seen that before!
MARK RICCOBONO: That's because it's a very rare item. It has Orioles on the front in braille. It's very big are braille. See if you can see what it says on the back at the top
ARCHER: N... F... B... the NFB!
MARK RICCOBONO: There you go, all right!
ORIANA: There's a Pepsi machine with different selections of soda on the right side, and we have a card swiper, but on these buttons there's braille to tell you which soda kinds they are. And to the right of the soda machine we have an M and M machine that dispenses M&Ms, and there's braille on each three of the flavors so you can choose which one you like most.
ARCHER: I would go with the originals.
ORIANA: That's a good choice. Here we have the conference room with letters that say, "conference room" and angled so that you can read it on the left side, and you can put your fingers on it. Archer, you want to try that. Here we have ceiling to floor bookshelves with braille books on them. Have you ever seen so many braille books in one space, Archer?
ARCHER: No, I've never seen so many braille books in any book place, but I think it might take two and a half Archers to reach the ceiling. Maybe just two Archers, I don't know.
ORIANA: That's a good measurement.
AD: Time lapse of them traveling to the braille graffiti wall.
ORIANA: This has six open braille cells spaced apart, and you can put balls in them to make letters, and you can spell out a message, and Archer is reading it right now.
ARCHER: It says, "braille rocks".
ORIANA: It does. He's right. And here you can feel where the braille is on the wall. Feel up here, or down here. You can feel all the braille on the art piece. And here, in all of our elevators in the building, we have braille buttons where all the numbers are, so Arch er, you can feel all of the buttons have braille on them
ARCHER: There's a number sign, then C, but C equals three, and here's a star, which is the main floor.
On their way to the Jacobus tenBroek Library, they make their way through the independence Market, exploring tactile maps, games, and white canes.
ORIANA: Here we have Louis Braille coins, and some of the coins are flipped over, so there are six coins.
ARCHER: I think that's a W. The ones that are flipped over. And this is a K
ORIANA: Yup. Do you know what K stands for as a contraction?
ARCHER: Knowledge.
MARK RICCOBONO: So this is to symbolize that braille is knowledge.
ORIANA: What's one word that comes to mind when you think of braille?
ARCHER: The future.
AD: (Other people voicing their answers: Joy, literacy, reading, communication, efficiency, freedom, independence, writing, adventure, connection, life, "braille makes me happy")
MARK RICCOBONO: When I think of Braille, I think of the word "power", and the power that braille gives us for knowledge, but also to harness our imagination, to think about how we can participate as equal contributors through all aspects of society, and throughout our headquarters building here in Baltimore, we find braille, and an expression of those ideas, those innovations and ways to express those ideas through art, through imagination, through literature, and so many other aspects.
So Braille is power.
So again, what's that one word that comes to mind when you think of braille? And how do you put it into operation in your life?
Let's continue the 200-year tradition of braille, and for another 200 years, make sure that braille empowers blind people to live the lives they want.
(Voiceover: Learn more at Braille.day. National Federation of the Blind. Live the life you want.)
MARK RICCOBONO: All right, so that's our 2025 Braille Day video. Please use that as an opportunity to also talk about the one word that comes to mind for YOU when you think about braille.
Now, there's many other aspects of how we utilize braille in building our organized blind movement. Of course, we operate the Braille Certification Program on behalf of the Library of Congress. We've now been doing that for well over a decade, almost closing out our second decade here. And last year, this time, we had Jennifer Dunham on the Presidential Release to talk about that.
We have, of course, our BELL Academies, where we have decided, so now, literally, again, for almost two decades, hundreds of thousands, really, of kids have grown up with better braille instruction because of the work of the National Federation of the Blind.
And that work in our movement continues. I thought I'd just mention a couple of recent things from our work in our Center of Excellence in Nonvisual Access, our technology area. Of course, we have been talking about our partnership with HumanWare and the American Printing House for the Blind to develop the Monarch tactile Braille display. And that development work continues. We'll have a new software version coming out soon, a software update, which will help to bring some significant new innovations to that dynamic product, and that comes to mind particularly because this weekend, we're hosting here our STEM2U training for our affiliates, where we'll be preparing about a dozen affiliates to host science programs for blind students, where we know that braille and tactile methodologies are really important.
Going back to technology, though, we're also anticipating, finally, the results of our advocacy work, especially with Google, but our advocacy work to make sure that the HID protocol is fully implemented so that braille display users using Bluetooth and Android have full access as they do with other platforms. That's been long in the works. We have a resolution about that. It's been discussed at Convention a number of times. I suspect that will be reality this year, and maybe by the time that we get to our 2025 Convention.
And in December, as part of our end of year giving campaign program, one of the things we were able to do thanks to Bryan Blazie of Blazie Engineering was giving away a BT Speak, and as part of that event, Bryan alluded to the fact that Blazie Technologies will be working on, beyond the BTSpeak, getting back into the braille space with some more modern devices.
And we know from our history there that the Blazie team has always taken into strong account the guidance of blind people and working closely with the National Federation of the Blind. So when we think about braille and this month of celebrating World Braille Day, there are a lot of innovations ahead of us.
And I'm really thankful that we have the powerful, authentic network of the National Federation of the Blind to keep influencing that. So happy Braille Day. I hope you find some interesting ways to promote braille this month. And if you haven't gotten around, gotten the opportunity to learn braille, I hope you tap someone on the shoulder in your local chapter and say, hey, I'd like to get started on braille, even to use it for functional things around my house. Can you help me out?
And I know that someone in your chapter will be happy to help. I'm really grateful for Braille, and I learned it because of a member of the National Federation of the Blind when I found this organization almost 30 years ago.
Okay!
I have a number of other announcements I'm going to go through really quickly before we get to the Q&A. First of all is to talk to you about our Midwest Student Seminar, and to tell you that registration is now open for the National Federation of the Blind 2025 Midwest Student Seminar, which is flying under the theme of "Beyond the Handshake: Networking in the Windy City".
And this event is hosted by our National Association of Blind Students, and it will be taking place March 7th to March 9, 2025, and this is a great opportunity to get together in Chicago with other blind students and share in learning about how to be successful and network with other blind students.
I know when I was a college student, finding the Student Division was transformative in terms of achieving my full participation in the college student experience.
You can visit the NABS website to learn more about this important event. Please note that there is a 100 dollar registration fee, and that fee needs to be paid, and the registration form completed by February 14, 2025, to secure your spot in this event. If you have questions or have questions on behalf of someone else, please contact Joshua Olukanni. You can reach him at 678-313-1543, or you can send an email to [email protected]
We'll go ahead and put that in the chat rather than spell it all out for you. Otherwise, please go to the NABS website and get all the information. Now, I also wanted to let you know that we do have a Where the Blind Work webinar coming up this month. And our Where the Blind Work webinar will be held on January 23 of this month, and it will be from 8:00 to 9:00 p.m. Eastern time via Zoom, and you should get ready for this important and informative discussion that will be all about braille transcription and language translation employment opportunities. There's a great panel of people lined up for this. You will need to register. There's no registration fee, but in order to get the Zoom information, you have to register.
So go to nfb.org for that.
Now, coming up very shortly, in, well, really less than a month, it will pretty much be over a month from now, is our 2025 Washington Seminar. Now, whether you're coming to the seminar or not, I have some announcements for you. Whether you're coming or not, you really need to be up-to-date on what our issues are, what we're talking about. Because whether you have the opportunity to step into a member of Congress' office, you can still influence them in the local community and influence others by being up to date on what our issues are.
So you should read and study the 2025 Washington Seminar fact sheets, which are now available online. You can read them in many different formats, and you can find them on the Washington Seminar page, nfb.org/washington-seminar. Another webpage you should have memorized.
I
said that they're available in a number of formats, including audio, braille-ready formats, HTML. I do want to remind you what our issues are. They actually are the same as last year. That's not always true. Our first issue is the Websites and Software Applications Accessibility Act. Our second issue is the Medical Device Nonvisual Accessibility Act. And finally, our Blind Americans Return to Work Act.
Now, three issues. Why only three? Well, when we're in a member of Congress' office, there's only so much time we have. Trust that we will work on way more than three issues during this next Congressional session.
In fact, we already are working on more than these three issues. And we know that there will be new proposals in Congress that we will pay attention to. So study up first on these top three, because we think we have a good chance of advancing them in this next session of Congress. Now, for those who are attending Washington Seminar, I have a few notes for you. First of all, this year, we are asking you to register that you will be in attendance at the Washington Seminar.
Now, there is no charge for the registration, but this is a new system that we've implemented so that we can better track who is working with us on the Hill, and we can make sure that we're pushing announcements and updates to folks in the preferred way they want while we're on the Hill.
So please go to that Washington Seminar page and register. Many of you already have. But we noticed that there are many more people that have rooms than have registered for the Washington Seminar. Also, the agenda of meetings happening in and around the Washington Seminar, including our Gathering In, our students, our career fair, the agenda is available at the website for you to review at this time.
Now, final announcement related to Washington Seminar is that we are hosting a number of trainings in advance of getting ready for the Washington Seminar. And the first of these Zoom training sessions for 2025 will take place this Thursday, January 9th. The start time for that meeting will be 8:00 p.m. Eastern time. The topic of meeting number 1 is the Washington Seminar issues and taking a deep dive on those.
These trainings are really helpful for you to be as prepared as possible to maximize your time on the Hill. Now, there will be three other training sessions via Zoom this month, and they're all a little different. Training session two will be what we call "mock meeting number 1", and that will be held on Monday, January 13th. The training after that will be training on the Washington Seminar Portal. That will be on January 15th.
And then we will have mock meeting number 2 on Thursday, January 23. All of these meetings are going to be held at 8:00 p.m. Eastern time. They're all going to be on Zoom. And anybody who is attending the Washington Seminar is welcome to participate in these trainings. The one on the Portal, however, is specifically for members of your delegation who will be using the Portal to... (audio dropping) -- and other activities during the Washington Seminar.
So look at the agenda and get ready for those. I'm sure we'll have some exciting announcements at our Great Gathering In. Now, before I move to some Federation family news, I want to remind each and every one of you that January is a great time to reevaluate your participation in our pre-authorized contribution program. You can make a monthly contribution, financial contribution, to the Federation, and it makes a big difference. Maybe over the holidays you decided to switch banks. Don't forget to switch your PAC contribution to your new bank.
Maybe you got a nice Christmas bonus, or your situation changed, and you want to up your PAC contribution for 2025.
(Audio dropping) -- every contribution, it will make a big difference for us in it 2025.
Thank you to all of our PAC contributors in 2024, and because I didn't say it earlier, thank you to each and every one of you who made an end of year gift to the Federation. I should say that we did meet our end of year match with HumanWare and our anonymous donor, so congratulations to all of us on a successful 2024 in that regard. Before I move to some questions, I do want to share with you a number of Federation family notes, and hang in there with me, because it's been a couple months since we've shared some of these.
So some of them are from November.
From Illinois, we learned of the passing of Bob Randall, who is the husband of Cathy Randall. He passed away on November 25th. Bob was a member of the NFB of Illinois for many years and served on the board there, and obviously Cathy Randall, longtime leader in our movement.
Also from Illinois, we've learned of the passing of Jean Rauschenbach on December 6. In addition to serving as a member and chapter president in Illinois, Jean was active in Minnesota before returning to Illinois. From Kansas, Tom Page reports the passing of Martha Kelly. Tom tells us that Martha first became a member in 1954 in Missouri, is his understanding, and that she served on the affiliate board in Kansas from 1990 to 2013 and was very active in many other capacities.
From Ohio, we belatedly learned of the passing of a member, and I probably normally wouldn't go back this far, but this is a significant one. We learned of the passing of Marian King, long time dedicated member of our Cincinnati chapter. Marian was 100 years old, and she passed away on July 24 of last year. From New Jersey, we learned that Donna Godfrey, member and wife of the Garden State Chapter vice president Ed Godfrey, passed away following a long battle with illness. She passed away on November 27th.
She was very active -- a very active member in our affiliate there, and had been active in the Garden State Chapter for more than 30 years. The note here says going back to the chapter's founding by Ever Lee Hairston.
So a longtime member. Please keep Donna and her family in your thoughts and prayers. From South Carolina, David Houc reports that in early December, the passing of Stanley Jackson, who was age 93, was a member of our Grand Strand Chapter, and he was a World War II veteran. Very active in fundraising for the chapter there in South Carolina.
From New Mexico, we learned of the passing of Albuquerque Chapter member Regina Mead on November 17, 2024.
And from Alabama, Lois Williams passed away on December 12th of last year. Lois was very active in our Diabetes Action Network activities in the state of Alabama. Also from Alabama, on December 30th, Louise Green passed away. She served as president of the National Federation of the Blind of Alabama beginning in 1985. She made it her life's mission to make sure that blind people had access to the things they needed to live the lives they want.
And finally, two items from Florida. Our Tallahassee Chapter reports the loss of long-time member on Thursday, December 19th. This is Tinetta Cooper, who passed away. And finally, from Florida, I wanted to note here that Harris Rosen, who was 85 years old, passed away right before Thanksgiving. Harris Rosen, of course, was the owner of Rosen Hotels and properties, was a great friend to the National Federation of the Blind, hosted us for many, many conventions, spoke at our convention, hired members of the Federation. He was a great friend of our movement. Certainly supported in a big way our blinded veterans.
I encourage you to keep all of these individuals, their friends and families, in your thoughts and prayers. Now, before we get to questions, though, I do have one spectacular item to share with you from the Federation family. This comes from Virginia, and that is the news that Chelsey Duranleau and Yadiel Sotomayor welcomed the birth of Lucas Leo Sotomayor Duranleau on December 22, 2024, at 6:07 a.m., weighing in at 6.1 pounds. And I am told that everybody is doing great.
So I'd like to welcome Lucas as the newest member of the National Federation of the Blind! Pam, that was a lot of stuff. Do we have time for questions?
Question and Answer Section
PAM ALLEN: Ha! Wow. You were not kidding. We had a lot to cover tonight!
(Laughter.)
But it was great. We do have time for questions. I want to thank everyone who has submitted questions. We appreciate it so much. And if we don't have a chance to get to your question tonight, our awesome communications team will be following up.
Also I wanted to mention that we are aware that there were some glitches with Zoom where the audio cut out randomly, so I just wanted to let everybody know that the full transcript and the recording will be available if you need to redo anything.
So thank you so much.
We had a Zoom gremlin afoot!
(Laughter.)
MARK RICCOBONO: Blame the snow.
PAM ALLEN: Exactly, exactly. Exactly, so President Riccobono, a couple questions. I loved the braille video, and the kickoff music related to braille. We had a question; how can people learn more about some of our NFB songs or our music?
MARK RICCOBONO: That's a great question. So there's a couple different ways. First of all, you can search on our NFB website, and a number of our song material is there.
But also, you heard at the top of the hour the Braille is Beautiful song. That came from an album we released in 2015 called The Rhythm of the Movement. You can find that album online. I know it's definitely on Apple Music.
It may be on other platforms. We were thinking about ways to maybe reorganize our archive of music and think about ways of creating contemporary music.
So you may see some new forms coming in the future.
Also, I'm pretty confident we still have copies of The Rhythm of the Movement on CD in the Independence Market.
PAM ALLEN: Such a great way to document the history of the movement. And we know how important teachers of the blind are -- we heard them on the braille song with our little
learners.
What are some ways that we help support teachers of blind students with braille literacy and promoting Braille?
MARK RICCOBONO: So a couple things I would share. First of all, we partner with the American Action Fund for Blind Children and Adults to publish Future Reflections. A lot of people think of Future Reflections as a publication for parents, but it's very explicit upfront, it's for parents and educators.
And that is so because, of course, parents need a lot of this inspiration, but it's an important way to keep teachers, especially emerging teachers in our field, grounded in the positive philosophy of the National Federation of the Blind.
And anybody who's been a teacher or, for that matter, a parent, knows that, you know, you can work with a child, yours or someone else's, and tell them something, but when someone else comes along, it usually has a different impact.
And so that's one way, you know, Future Reflections is a tool that aa lot of teachers benefit from, because they can say, hey! Here's a blind person that's done this. Or, hey! Here's something interesting that blind people are doing. Did you know that?
And it may be something that they've talked to their student about. But when it comes from somewhere else, it has more credibility. The other thing I'd say is, of course, we want to promote great teachers. And this is a great opportunity for us to note that we do have a Distinguished Educator of Blind Students Award that we give out every year at our National Convention. Applications are open for that now. You can find that on our website.
We've also published about it in our Braille Monitor. And that is a great way. If you have a teacher of blind students who's doing great work in your community, nominate them for that award! Because that recognition, you know, the good teachers, the ones that are really digging in and doing great work for blind people, they're not getting recognized by their school districts for doing that.
And we sometimes talk a lot about the teachers that aren't doing so well by blind students -- rightfully so. It's frustrating. So we should take those opportunities to celebrate the teachers that are out there.
Finally, our chapters and affiliates can work with these teachers. You know, there's only so much we can do at the national level to connect with teachers. It's really critical that you connect with teachers in your local community, because our chapters also give teachers a built-in network of mentors for their students. And again, really important perspective that they can give. So there's a lot of partnerships there. I know our Greater Baltimore Chapter has done some work to reach out and celebrate students, teachers of blind students, especially during American Education Week, Teacher Appreciation Week, those are great opportunities to reach out and say, we appreciate what you're doing, and National Federation of the Blind wants to support you.
PAM ALLEN: For people considering blindness education, how does someone become a member?
MARK RICCOBONO: Great question. If you go to nfb.org and navigate to the "about us" section, you'll see our national divisions and you'll find our Professionals in Blindness Education listed there. And you'll find contact information for the president, also the listserv will be there, and any other information.
And that will be your best connection.
(Audio cutting out)
PAM ALLEN: Excellent. Also, I know we have some great opportunities out of Louisiana Tech University for people who might be interested in becoming teachers of blind students. I know there's a huge demand.
So it's so great to hear about all the different ways NFB is supporting our teachers
MARK RICCOBONO: Yeah, I knew I missed something. Thank you for growing that in! -- throwing that in!
(Laughter.)
Great partners at Louisiana Tech. If you want to choose a program, that's the one to go to, definitely.
PAM ALLEN: I think we have time for a few more questions about Washington Seminar. There's a lot of excitement about Washington Seminar, and like you said, not just the actual seminar on the Hill, but also the activity that we do following up.
So there was a question about whether there would be tours of the national center offered at Washington Seminar.
MARK RICCOBONO: Oftentimes we do offer tours of the national office during Washington Seminar. This year, we are not offering tours for a variety of reasons. Certainly we will in the future. But this year, we have elected not to offer tours, because we have a number of other places where we need people and resources.
So there will not be a tour in conjunction with the Washington Seminar this year, unfortunately.
PAM ALLEN: Okay. And also, the Great Gathering In, how can people who may not be there in person tune in? And what should they expect for some of our first timers?
MARK RICCOBONO: Ah, great question. So the Great Gathering-In meeting happens, by long standing tradition, at 5:00 p.m. on -- (audio cutting out) We work really hard to keep it two hours. You can consider it kind of a pep rally for getting the troops fired up to go advocate in the halls of Congress. It's also a great opportunity, since we have so many members, 500 members or so, in person, to give some updates and talk about some of our program work.
So it's a two-hour meeting. It goes along really fast, at least in my experience!
And it's high-energy. So you will be able to join on Zoom, just like you have for this release. You will be able to ask your Amazon related device to open our skill. You'll be able to get it on YouTube. All the same ways that you participate in the Presidential Release live, you'll be able to get to the Gathering-In. It will be effectively be our Presidential Release live event for February.
And I know that 5:00 is maybe a little bit early for some folks on the west coast, or maybe Hawaii, but please tune in. It's a high-energy meeting. I expect we'll have some new announcements. Maybe Pam will even tell us some stuff about New Orleans. I don't know!
(Laughter.)
So definitely tune in.
PAM ALLEN: I just want you to know, six months from tomorrow!
MARK RICCOBONO: There you go, yeah!
PAM ALLEN: Is the beginning of Convention.
MARK RICCOBONO: That's right.
PAM ALLEN: So 5:00 p.m. is where everyone is going to be tuning in on February 3rd for the Great Gathering-In, whether you're there in person or virtually.
So it is a wonderful way, it's so much energy in the room.
So I know we'll all be looking forward to that, whether we're there in person or virtually. And our last question for tonight, just a quick question related to our Independence Market. Any updates in respect to ordering?
MARK RICCOBONO: We're still taking orders!
(Laughter.)
We do encourage you to call. We believe that there will be some other methods for ordering products from the Independence Market very soon.
PAM ALLEN: Yay. Awesome. So we have lots of excites announcements happening.
MARK RICCOBONO: That's right.
PAM ALLEN: In 2025! Excellent. Well, as we continue -- we started off this year with a bang with a lot going on. So it has been great to be with you tonight, President Riccobono. Thank you so much, everyone for being with us tonight. Please join us for our Washington Seminar Great Gathering-In on Monday, February 3rd, at 5:00 p.m. Eastern. We will not have a Presidential Release live in February, so please tune in to the chapter Presidential Release recording at your February chapter meeting. You can contact President Riccobono at 410-659-9314 or via email at office of the president at nfb.org. Thank you so much, and happy new year. I'll pass it back to you, President Riccobono
MARK RICCOBONO: Thanks, Pam, great to be with you. See you soon
PAM ALLEN: See you in a few weeks!
MARK RICCOBONO: And go Ravens!
(Laughter.)
PAM ALLEN: Go Bills.
MARK RICCOBONO: We're hearing people yell "go Detroit! Go Lions"
I'm sure this will be a topic of conversation at the Washington Seminar. That is what I had for the Federation family this evening. I do want to say that we do have many great things ahead this year, many reasons to be optimistic. One thing I did not mention earlier, which I intended to, so I will do here, is we do have a milestone here in January 2025, because we do have a new editor of the Braille Monitor.
So I want to use this opportunity to thank Gary Wonder for his tremendous stewardship of the Monitor during the past 14 years or so. And Gary hasn't gone anywhere. He's still doing great work for us. He's taking on some new assignments.
But I wanted to let everybody know, if you didn't open your Monitor yet, here on the seventh day of the year, to note that Chris Danielsen is now editor of our Braille Monitor. You should.
And I want to encourage you to make Chris' life easy by writing an article for the Braille Monitor! It will be a great new year's resolution. I know that when I came into the Federation, that I was encouraged to write ideas think about blindness, sharing my ideas in the Braille Monitor, was very empowering, and I encourage you to do that as well.
Looking forward to being with as many of you at the Washington Seminar, and we're going to have our state presidents here for a meeting before that. So many great activities coming up in the next month, and I'll look forward to our next opportunity to be together live at our event at the Great Gathering-In. Now some customary endings to close out our gathering here today, I thought I'd ask, what does a gingerbread man put on their bed? Well, a cookie sheet, of course! And why did the musician keep her trumpet out in the snow?
Well, they really liked playing cool jazz, of course! Now, what do you call a snowman on rollerblades? Well, that would be a snowmobile!
Let's go build the National Federation of the Blind!
(Instrumental version of Live the Life You Want playing)
The preceding message was because to you by Mark Riccobono, president, National Federation of the Blind, 410-659-9314, office of the president at nfb.org. Follow President Riccobono on Mastodon. Just search for @president at nfb.social. Let's go build the National Federation of the Blind!