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

Good evening!

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

There’s still time to at .

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

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

Dear CCB Friends and Family –

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

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

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

Last month we celebrated Juneteenth for the first time at the center, thanks to a request made by two of our students, Q and James, shown left to right above.

James is from Georgia and wanted to have a Juneteenth celebration because the day is celebrated back home. Julie readily agreed. Barbecue being the traditional way to celebrate, James determined to grill up burgers and brats for the entire center, with delicious baked beans and corn on the cob, of course. ������ Management Instructor Dishon Spears gave him lots of support. Then In philosophy, we read the Emancipation Proclamation and Q led a discussion of its continued importance to Black Americans.