[nabs-l] a summary of tonight's NABS membership call

[Amy Sabo]

Dear chris,

Thanks for a wonderful job that you did about this summary of this
conference call which was held on this past Sunday night.

You did a wonderful job and, thanks for doing this for nabs!

Take care and, I will talk to you soon.




Hugs,
amy

-----Original Message-----
From: nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org [mailto:nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org] On Behalf
Of Chris Nusbaum
Sent: Sunday, February 26, 2012 7:24 PM
To: National Association of Blind Students mailing list
Cc: mdabs; jsotwel at carrollk12.org
Subject: [nabs-l] a summary of tonight's NABS membership call

Hello fellow NABS members,

As we do every month, the National Association of Blind Students
(NABS) has a membership conference call, in which we pick a topic to discuss
and possibly have guest speakers to talk about that topic, in an effort to
provide more information to blind students about topics of interest to us.
This month's call, entitled All About Scholarships, was no exception. For
those of you who were not able to attend the conference call or listen to
the stream of it live on Audio Access FM, I am providing a short summary of
the things discussed and the information provided in tonight's call.

This month, the topic for our membership call was "All About Scholarships."
As many of us know as blind students, scholarships are very important to us
if we plan on going to college, so this is an important topic. To tell us
about their organization's scholarships, we had 3 guest speakers on
tonight's call: Patti Gregory-Chang, Chair of the Scholarship Comittee (at
the national level) for the National Federation of the Blind; Mark Lucas,
Executive Director of the United States Association of Blind Athletes, and
Melissa Greenwald of Learning Ally, formerly RFB&D. First up was Patti
Chang, to talk about the 30 scholarships the NFB offers for blind college
students. These scholarships range in value from $3000 to $12000 and anyone
who is legally blind and who is registered at an accredited college can
apply. As Patti discussed in her portion of the call, an applicant must have
these requirements: (1) an applicant must be legally blind in both eyes
(2200 or worse in best eye,) (2) the applicant must have a completed
application, (3) must be registered at an accredited college or university
(online schools, if accredited, do count) and must be there to earn a
degree, and (4) a finalist must attend the full national convention of the
Federation in Dallas from June 30 to July 5, 2012. Applications for NFB
scholarships can be either filled out online or downloaded and mailed in as
a print application. The link to the NFB scholarship page, where you can
fill out or download the application, is www.nfb.org/scholarships. If you
have any questions about the NFB scholarship program, you can email Patti
Chang at pattichang at att.net or the scholarships email, which is
scholarships at nfb.org. If you need any further assistance, you can call
Loraine Rovig at the national center.

Our next speaker was Mark Lucas, Executive Director of the United States
Association of Blind Athletes (USABA,) to talk about the scholarships they
provide. These scholarships are called the Arthur and Helen Copeland
Scholarship Awards, and are given to 1 male, and 1 female blind college
student. The only requirements USABA has for eligibility for the scholarship
program is that the applicant must be legally blind and must be a college
student in an accredited college.
The application for their scholarship can be found at www.usaba.org.
If you have any questions, you are encouraged to contact Mark Lucas by email
at mlucas at usaba.org.

Our final speaker was Melissa Greenwald of Learning Ally, formerly Recording
for the Blind and Dyslexic (RFB&D.) They offer scholarships to deserving
blind college students as well. The requirements to be eligible to receive
the Learning Ally scholarships are the same as those of the other
scholarships I have mentioned, with this exception:
to be eligible for the Learning Ally scholarship, you must have a grade
point average (GPA) of at least 3.0 on a 4.0 scale, or something equivalent
to that if your school does not follow that scale for GPA's. The application
for the Learning Ally awards can be either filled out online or downloaded
and printed in Microsoft Word or PDF format from
www.learningally.org/awards. If you have any questions about the Learning
Ally award program, email Mellisa Greenwald at mgreenwald at learningally.org.

With that information, the call concluded, and so does this summary. I hope
this summary helped those of you who were unable to be on the call. If you
would like to listen to the call itself, David Dunphy recorded it and will
be posting it to the NABS Web site within a few days. In the meantime, I
hope you found this summary to be beneficial!

Thanks,

Chris Nusbaum

--
Chris Nusbaum

"The real problem of blindness is not the loss of eyesight. The real problem
is the misunderstanding and lack of education that exists. If a blind person
has the proper training and opportunity, blindness can be reduced to a mere
physical nuissence." -- Kenneth Jernigan

Visit the I C.A.N. Foundation online at: www.icanfoundation.info for
information on our foundation and how it helps blind and visually impaired
children in MD say "I can!"

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