Vol. 9 No. 4 - Fall 2008

Message from the President

Kirk Adams, President – Seattle Lighthouse for the Blind

For blind and Deaf-Blind people across the country, living independently means addressing challenges and embracing opportunities every day. Here at the Lighthouse, it’s no different. For every challenge we face, we find an opportunity to overcome barriers and create new opportunities for blind and Deaf-Blind adults to achieve their goals.

An ongoing challenge we face in our community is a serious lack of access to information and communication for Deaf-Blind people. We address this challenge through our Deaf-Blind community classes, which provide essential information to Deaf-Blind individuals in an accessible environment. In community class, Deaf-Blind people learn about everything from upcoming elections to safety preparedness. We could not offer this wonderful program without the hard work of volunteer interpreters and the support of community donors. Their commitment makes it possible to overcome these challenges.

An immediate challenge we now face is a downturn of work in our manufacturing shop. The recent machinist strike affects the volume of work we manufacture for The Boeing Company. We are meeting this challenge by temporarily ending our second shift and moving all blind machinists to the day shift.

We will endeavor to weather the storm by re-assigning some employees to work on AbilityOne products for our government customers. Our simultaneous goals are to preserve our reserve funds, which are intended to protect the organization against truly catastrophic occurrences, and maintain current levels of blind employment. I thank our Lighthouse team and partners for working together to overcome this challenge to meet these goals.

While we are addressing new and ongoing challenges, we are also discovering new opportunities to expand employment opportunities to blind people. We recently had the opportunity to form a partnership with the ACCO Corporation to expand our communication board line. We used this as an opportunity to open our Inland Northwest facility and bring employment to blind adults in the Spokane area. Thanks all those who made this possible: our board of trustees, staff at the Seattle campus, ACCO, National Industries for the Blind, The Greater Spokane Chamber of Commerce, and the Inland Northwest Lighthouse for the Blind employees.

Every day brings new challenges and opportunities and every one of our blind and Deaf-Blind employees has overcome those challenges and embraced opportunities to succeed. In this issue of Horizons, you’ll read Quincy Daniels’ story. Quincy was born blind. Growing up, he developed the blindness skills and work ethic to become one of our most highly valued and respected machinists. You can read more about his story on the next page.

Quincy is one of over 200 people here at the Lighthouse with a story to tell, and the best way to hear these stories is to visit the Lighthouse on a tour. To schedule a tour of our organization, please contact Development Assistant Keri Brent at (206) 436-2134 or email kbrent@seattlelh.org. We hope to see you here soon.

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