[IL-Talk] chicago minutes january 2021

Tue Feb 9 13:29:51 UTC 2021

I do not believe that Diana Sanchez has joined yet. She was new to our meeting but is checking us out for now. 

Patti S. Gregory-Chang Esq.
National Federation of the Blind of Illinois, 2nd Vice President
773-307-6440
www.nfbofillinois.org 

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Subject: [IL-Talk] chicago minutes january 2021

NFBI CHICAGO CHAPTER MEETING

JANUARY 9, 2021

The meeting took place via THE Zoom platform.

President David Meyer called the meeting to order at 1:11 pm. There were 25 people present.
What’s Happening: Gregory Rosenberg’s mother is dealing with Stage IV ovarian cancer. Michal Nowicki stated that he has been in touch with the JI Institute at the University of Pennsylvania and they are doing clinical trial research for various mutations. Recently JI started gene therapy for Michal’s mutations. So he is going down to Philadelphia at the end of the month for an evaluation, If things go well and he wants to go forward, then he will be participating in a clinical trial which may give him some level of vision. Francisco Chang received the first set of vaccinations for COVID-19 and will get the second one shortly after. Nadia Sherman will be having surgery on 2/1. Ken Schad says that Friedman Place will receive the first vaccine for COVID-19 on 1/21 and will get the next vaccine on 2/18. Edward Hood is going to become a Shriner.

First Vice President, Patti Chang, stated that 2 new people have joined NFBI, Edward Hood and Diana Sanchez. They both told us about themselves. Edward said that he was going to ICRE Wood. He is learning how to use a laptop and learning how to write Braille, He has been blind since 2005. Diana is a director of a daycare center in Des Plaines. She wants to start incorporating early childhood with children with visual impairments. She’s married with 3 children. The daycare where Diana works is where Patti’s granddaughter goes to daycare. Patti also went through and confirmed who is actively on the membership list. 
We are doing this for 2 reasons. 1. If you want to be a member and you haven’t paid dues, you should pay dues and you can mail those to Steve Hastalis. 2. Patti keeps the membership records and she wants people to contact her if they believe that the records are incorrect. When we get to voting, people who are members can vote. Patti read the list.

Secretary’s minutes for December 12, 2020: Approved.
Treasurer’s Report: Fourth quarter treasurer’s report for October, November, and December 2020. Beginning balance on 10/1/20: $4,875. 
Income monthly collections Zoom meetings due to COVID-19 $0, dues $5 annually 27 memberships subtotal $135, donation $120, Chicago Chapter Read-a-thon subtotal $675, total $930. Expenses Electronic withdrawal NFB preauthorized contributions (PAC) to the national office $50 monthly October, November, December, subtotal $150. Coozie reimbursed to Hastalis for payment to NFBI to offset the cost $100, NFB general unrestricted contribution instead of paying toward 2021 Washington Seminar traveling expenses $2,000, Exchequer Restaurant and Pub room rent prepaid $75 apiece for the next 12 events subtotal $900, total
$3,150 total expenses. Ending balance 12/31/20, 2020 $2,655.The check register ends with the same figure. The treasure’s report was approved.

State Presidential Report: 1st Vice President of NFBI and Chicago Chapter board member, Denise Avant, gave the state presidential report for Marilyn Green. She welcomed our 2 new members. Dustin Cather stated that we have 9 people for our Washington Seminar 2021 team Illinois delegation. They are Natalia Abar, Denise Avant, Ellen Bartelt, Dustin Cather, Marilyn Green, Steve Hastalis, John Holtgreve, Jennifer Howe and Juliet Walker. The Washington Seminar will be held virtual this year. We will meet with congressional representatives or members of their staff to talk about this year’s legislative agenda. This year’s Washington Seminar will take place on Monday, 2/8 and that will be our Great Gathering In which will start at 4:00 pm central and that will be livestreamed on YouTube Issue #1: Access Technology Affordability Act (ATAA): The ATAA is a type of bill that will give a tax refundable incentive up to $2,000 for
3 years and this is for people to buy access technology. This gives a
$2,000 tax refundable credit for that. Blind Americans need access technology because it helps us become more competitive in the job market.
Issue #2; we’re streamlining the greater access and independence through non-visual access technology (GAIN Act): This year we’re working to make home medical devices more accessible to blind folks.
Issue #3: We’re going to be talking about website accessibility. This has always been a priority of the NFB, but this year we’re going to bring it to the Washington Seminar. We’re going to be working with Congress to create a law that creates a regulation to help give guidance to businesses to make their websites accessible.
We’re going to be talking with members of Congress regarding blind people’s right to vote independently, privately and with the same ease as our sighted peers. We’re working to make voting completely accessible in all states. Go to www.nfb.org/washingtonseminar for fact sheets.
Denise adds that this year with the virtual Washington Seminar, it gives us a unique opportunity to invite the rest of our membership on certain appointments to show that we support the agenda that has been set out. If you live in a particular congressional district, we might ask you to come into a Zoom meeting with us and be there to support and let the congressional representatives know our strength. Dave states that he will be putting the fact sheets on Newsline. They will remain up all year. The national office will also put them up on NewsLine through the duration of the Washington Seminar. They will be their own section, Washington Seminar Fact Sheets 2021 or 2021 Washington Seminar Fact Sheets. The Great Gathering In will be livestreamed.
National and State Scholarship Programs: Our application period for our NFBI scholarship program is now open. Applications are due by midnight central time on 3/31. The application is up on our website. We’re also making every effort to distribute applications through our mailing list to get the word out. So even if you’re not a student and not eligible to apply for scholarship, please spread the word to anybody who might be eligible and might be interested. We’re offering 3 scholarships this year as a minimum and the scholarships are open to any student who either lives in or studies in Illinois. You could be from out of state, but you’re attending school here. It needs to be post-secondary accredited degree-granting program. The application is pretty simple. 
We need one letter of recommendation and an essay and a transcript from the most recent school attended. The scholarships are granted on the basis of academic excellence as well as participation in community activities and leadership potential. There is also a national scholarship program. The stakes are higher. Scholarships in the national program start at $3,000 and go up to $12,000. Students can apply to both programs. If they’re eligible to apply to the Illinois program, they should also apply to the national program. They can use the same documents.
There is a Midwest Student Spring Seminar this year; it will be all day on Saturday 3/20. For more information, you can go to the National Association of Blind Students website. It’s a division of the NFB and you will find more information about the seminar. The registration is going to be $25.
The dates for our NFB national convention are 7/6 to 7/11. The convention is scheduled to be in New Orleans. We aren’t sure whether we will be meeting in person at this point. More information will be forthcoming about the national convention in President Riccobono’s presidential release and in upcoming issues of the Braille Monitor, which is our flagship publication.

Program: David Flament is going to be talking about a social network for the blind. Vorail is a Facebook for the blind. It’s more of a community than Facebook could ever be. Vorail is an APP that you want on your iPhone or your Android phone and, coming soon, it will be a skill that you can enable on your Amazon Alexa. So, you can leave your voice to leave messages to people. You use your voice to post questions to people. You use your voice to answer other peoples’ questions or posts or messages. The developer cares very much about people in our community. It is a subscription service. It is still in beta testing on Android, so you can download it from the Google Play store for free for now. It’s still in beta testing with the Amazon Alexa, but that will be coming soon. It has been first developed on IOS with the new iPhones. 
The subscription service is $5.00 a month or $50 annually. You can learn more about Vorail on vorail.com. So you can go there. You can listen to posts that people put up. There are professional writers that are on Vorail. There are several audio engineers on Vorail. Vorail is an App that is available all over the world. Vorail has its own interface independent of Voiceover. It uses its own gestures. When you start Vorail for the first time, it says “Welcome to the Vorail tutorial“and its walks you through each of the gestures and it lets you practice them before it drops you into the community. You cannot access Vorail using a PC or standard telephone. You either have to do it with the IOS App, the Android App or soon with Alexa. Vorail is strictly questions and answers but they have had other features such as podcasts. You can recommend podcasts to other community members. You can listen to them in Vorail. There are about 200 to 300 that are active on a daily basis. The developer is always accessible via email, on Vorail snf hr will listen to anyone’s ideas. The developer has a mute button that lets you mute other people in the community, not from anybody else, just from you. They no longer see you and you no longer see them, The developer wants to start teaching people about Vorail and asked Mr. Flament if you can do it over Zoom, The developer suggested to Mr. Flament to reach out to other organizations and see if they want to do a workshop at the developer’s expense. If any of you are interested in a Zoom workshop on Vorrail, you can email Mr. Flament at dflament at yahoo.com and the developer will donate the money to NFBI. You can email the developer at tom at vorail.com .

Presidential Release #501: President Riccobono wished everyone a happy new year and happy World Braille Day. The Independence Market will be offering a special deal on the Louis Braille bicentennial silver dollar. It will be offered at a reduced price for this week only at $50 plus shipping and handling. Buy as many as you want. Our Independence Market staff says throughout the month of January, there are a number of other items on sale including camera bags, cube clocks, egg separators and monoculars. Also, the NFB face mask are also in stock. 
The masks are a medium blue color with the NFB logo in the center. The price is $4.00 per mask or 3 masks for $10. The market will be having special sales every month during this year, so you should stay tuned for the special promotions coming from the market on a monthly basis. 
To order, you can call the Independence Market at 410-659-9314, extension 2216 or you can email independencemarkett at nfb.org. We do hope our e-commerce system will be up and running soon. President Riccobono thanked all those who helped match gift contribution from Freedom Scientific. We matched Freedom’Scientific’s $50,000 before the end of the year and so we were able to secure that funding thanks to the generous contributions. Our Dream Makers’ Circle is a way for you to pledge a gift to the end-of-life legacy to the NFB and to continue your commitment to our organization. Depending on your circumstances, this could be done quite quickly and less than 30 minutes and it can be done at no cost. Reach out to Patti Chang at our national office to talk to her about how you can best contribute to the Dream Makers’ Circle. You can reach her at our main number at Extension 2422 or you can email her at pchang at nfb.org.
We’re getting ready for our Washington Seminar and our Great Gathering In will be happening on 2/8 at 4:00 pm central time and will be carried via zoom There will be a number of other meetings happening in conjunction with the Washington Seminar.
On 12/10/20, the Department of Transportation released the fina rule pertaining to air travelers using service animals. It goes into effect starting 1/11/21. The rule permits airlines to require passengers to complete the DOT Service Animal Air Transportation Form. We’ve been doing quite a bit of advocacy work around this form including giving the Department of Transportation extensive feedback on the inaccessibility of this form that they have proposed. On 12/22/20, NFB issued an open letter to all airlines urging them not to require the form. It is optional for airlines, We’re going to continue to work on this issue.
One thing you’re probably wondering about is our national convention, which is coming up in July. We’ve been watching the situation very closely and the national board has not yet made a final decision about the convention, but it is extremely likely that we will be having a virtual convention this summer.
In the last month or so, there has been a significant conversation especially in social media about sexual assault and misconduct within the blindness community and a lot of that conversation has been focused on activities within NFB and that has been a primary concern for us as members and leaders of this movement. Although we established our Code of Conduct 3 Januaries ago, we recognize that there’s a lot more work to do. 2018 was only the beginning and our commitment for 2021 is to do even better, to accelerate our progress at a significant rate. We want NFB to be a safe and healthy space for all blind people, for our family, for our friends and that includes our 3 training centers. 
Between now and our national convention, we are going to be pouring significant efforts into increasing our safety and respect for all members within this organization. It’s going to mean that we’re going to have some hard discussions about how we move forward and also where we’ve been. On 12/16, President Riccobono published an open letter with details, some of the immediate actions that we’re thinking about and how we’re going to move forward, You can read that open letter in the January Braille Monitor as well as the revision to the Code of Conduct that the Board of Directors adopted in its fall meeting early in December. We’re kicking off in 2021 with some additional announcements, specific actions that we’re taking to accelerate this work in NFB and it’s going to take all of us to make this happen. We have established a partnership with RAINN. RAINN is the nation’s largest anti sexual violence organization. The purpose of this partnership is to assist us in furthering a safe, inclusive and welcoming culture free of sexual misconduct as part of all NFB programs and activities. You can visit RAINN’s website at rainn.org, if you need it, they have a national sexual assault help line that you can reach at any time. It’s free to anybody. You can reach that by calling 1800-656-hope (4673). Our work with RAINN is initially going to include 2 important phases. We’re having that kickoff meeting in a couple of days. Phase #1 is going to be to create and conduct a mandatory training program regarding sexual violence and misconduct for staff, volunteers and leadership within the organization. In March of this year, we’re going to start with all of the boards of our state affiliates, our national divisions, all of the staff at our national office, all of the staff at our affiliated training centers as well as the students at the training centers. We’re eager to find out how we’re going to sustain this training going forward to the thousands of members within our organization and those members to come. The second thing that we’re going to do most immediately with RAINN is review and augment the NFB Code of Conduct to include the strongest possible policies and practices aimed at preventing sexual misconduct and assault within our organization. We’re relying on RAINN’s expertise to assist us in identifying the best practices and incorporating them directly into our Code of Conduct and we plan to do that very quickly before our national convention. We’ll also be devising ongoing training and resources in collaboration with RAINN and their nationwide leading expertise. In we know blindness, they know sexual assault and violence prevention and we’re going to be identifying through their expertise how we’re going to sustain these efforts and what we need to do after the national convention. We are launching a survivor-led task force as part of our efforts to implement a sustainable positive culture change4 within the3 NFB. Our task force is going to be entirely led by survivors and is going to serve as an intermediate advisory team to the NFB leaders, members snf third party partners and that will be in place until we find more long-term solutions. We set the timeline for the initial work of the task force through the national convention and, based on its recommendations, it may continue after that or there may be some other sustainable system for survivors within our organization to find support and relief. This task force is led by 6 Federation members who are survivors and who are dedicated in making the Federation the safest and best place it can be for all blind people. They will provide a safe space for survivors to give input, to share information stories, to assist in the developing aspect of our work going forward. They will also make recommendations alongside RAINN to make sure that we can develop sustainable long-term structures through the Federation to support survivors and to have a misconduct-free zone throughout our organization. President Riccobono and other leaders of the Federation will meet with the task force as often as they want and we agreed to meet at least on a weekly basis. Go to nab.org/survivors and find the initial announcement. You can send an email to survivors at nfb.org and, at any time, you can call our main number at 410-659-9314 and dial extension 2238. So leave a voicemail and one of our task force members will get back to you. You can use any of these methods to share your ideas. Every chapter meeting, convention, training seminar, educational program and enrichment opportunities offered by NFB needs to be safe and welcoming to all.
We will be continuing to work on our broader diversity and inclusion efforts. We will be continuing to find new ways to accelerate the pipeline of individuals from diverse perspectives to get into elected positions within the Federation to help shape our organization, Our board has developed an accessibility policy for affiliates but consistent with our national accessibility policy to make sure that all or our affiliates but consistent with our national accessibility policy to make sure that all of our affiliates is doing everything to be fully inclusive to all blind people. We will be training and resources to assist affiliates in effectively implementing those accessibility practices. You can reach the committee by sending an email to diversity at nfb.org. The committee will be having an open meeting where everybody can listen in whether you are a member of the committee or not. That open meeting will be happening in March.
President Riccobono wants to congratulate and thank the members of the Federation who worked on getting our blind Randolph Shepherd vendors some relief. The most recent COVID legislation that was passed included a $20 million appropriation for our blind vendors and this relief bill thanks to Congress and the work of our advocates across the country is going to provide relief to blind entrepreneurs who have been sidelined because of COVID-19.
In the early part of this year, we received a note from Ryan Strunk, president of the NFB of Minnesota, reporting the death of longtime Federation leader, Joyce Scanlan, who died of heart failure. She served as first vice president of our national board for many years. Joyce served as Blind Inc’s executive director from its founding in 1986 until her retirement in 2003.
Read-a-thon: The Read-a-thon is where anyone who wishes to do it reads for 2 or 3 hours. In the past, it has been 3 hours. What one would do would be to contribute $10 in order to participate in the fundraiser. 
However, if you’re able to raise $10 or more from other members or people outside of the blind community, your $10 entrance fee would be waived. You can read Braille, print and audio reading. If you have books on a Victor Stream, you could participate that way. Any kind of audio reading would be acceptable. We discussed whether we would have the Read-a-thon in March. Dave asked if we should do it this year or wait till next year. Eileen made a motion that we do the Readathon this year in March but then amended the motion to May. Marylou Grunwald made a motion to have the Readathon on the first Saturday in May, which is 5/1.

Old Business: None.

New Business: There is going to be a Metra ADA committee meeting on 2/2. We will do it with some kind of conference call. Metra has its own conference bridge, so it would not be a Zoom,but it would be a Metra extension.

The meeting was adjourned at 3:35 pm.

Respectfully submitted: Eileen F. Truschke, Secretary, Chicago Chapter _______________________________________________
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