[IL-Talk] chicago minutes draft two

[David Meyer]

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 were 
present at the meeting. 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