[NFBOH-Cleveland] A message from the Membership Committee

[Suzanne Turner]

National Federation of the Blind of Ohio

A Message From The Membership Committee

 

Dear Ohio Members and Friends,

 

As we move closer to the State of Ohio Convention, I am trusting that all of
the Ohio Affiliate members will be in attendance. Membership should be very
important not only to a few, but all. Therefore, Membership must be at the
forefront of how we move together as a collective force. We are a family and
sometimes we may not agree, certainly we should be able to work together for
the common good.

 

Everyone is needed to do the work of the federation. We can not sustain with
only a few standing tall ready for battle. Opinions, decisions and
personalities are what makes this affiliate strong and stable. If we were
all alike, the world would be boring. So, let's get packed, let's call
friends and members who say they're not attending to let them know that our
arms are wide, and our backs are strong with dedication to raise
expectations for everyone who is blind or blind like. There is room for you
and you! 

 

You do not have to be perfect, just present. Leaders are not born, but
formed and everyone can play a part as a mentor, leader, teacher and
scholar. Below, I have attached a chapter from the book "Building The Lives
We Want", that talks about the ways in which members grow in the federation.
We all matter, and I hope this inspires everyone to travel to the most
happenings in Ohio on November 17, 2023 to Columbus.

 

We have had a great year in Ohio. So, let's celebrate at the convention!

 


CHAPTER FOURTEEN: LOVE, HOPE, AND DETERMINATION: DEVELOPING EFFECTIVE
LEADERSHIP 


by Sharon Maneki and Corbb O'Connor

 

Dr. Jernigan thought of me as both an adult and a responsible colleague.
Others had told me I was an adult; he was the first person I had ever met
who seemed thoroughly to believe it. He made it absolutely clear that every
person at the seminar was expected to carry part of the load-even scared,
college-kid me!

-Mary Ellen Gabias, 19991

 

The National Federation of the Blind has not only survived, but has
flourished for seventy-five years. Its success is due in large measure to
its ability to develop effective leaders. Leadership development has been
one of the organization's highest priorities since its inception. Because
the Federation is neither a social club nor a trade association, our leaders
must drive our movement toward the full integration of the blind into
society. As society evolves, our dynamic movement adjusts; as we eliminate
one barrier to full integration, others appear and must be assaulted.
Effective leadership is crucial, because if the Federation fails to achieve
its goals, the lives of blind persons will be diminished. Over the past
seventy-five years, our organization has grown from a few dozen members to
several thousand, connected through a series of formal and informal
mentoring relationships.

 

In a conversation with Sharon Maneki, immediate past NFB president Dr. Marc
Maurer described two basic approaches to developing leadership. The first
approach is to observe someone who is already a leader and persuade that
individual to devote his or her talents to the Federation. The second
approach is to find people with untapped potential and teach them to become
leaders. The Federation makes full use of both of these approaches.2

 

Dr. Donald Capps came to the Federation by the first approach. Dr. Capps was
a successful insurance executive with proven leadership ability when his
brother invited him to speak to a group of blind people. Within a year,
Capps was the president of that group. He helped bring the group into the
Federation, and he soon became president of the South Carolina affiliate.
Dr. Capps has the longest record of service as a member of the national
board of directors, and he is renowned for his accomplishments in organizing
chapters throughout the country.3

 

Dr. Marc Maurer came to the organization by way of the second approach. He
was not yet a leader when he joined the Federation as a student at the Iowa
Commission for the Blind. Through mentoring from Dr. Kenneth Jernigan as
well as experiences organizing events and chapters, Dr. Maurer became an
outstanding leader in the organization, and he is its longest-serving
national president.

 

Federation members and leaders share the bonds of a common cause. People at
every level of the organization have experienced the pain of discrimination
and exclusion, the thrill of new challenges, and the joy of accomplishment.
We sustain one another with mutual respect and love. We offer the hope of a
better life for blind people, and we have the determination to reach our
goals. Love, hope, and determination keep the organization on course to
develop effective leadership.

 


The Continual Search for Leaders


 

Our movement has always simultaneously searched for members and leaders. In
the early days, we looked in schools for the blind, sheltered workshops, and
social clubs for blind adults. As more and more blind children were
channeled into regular public schools in the 1950s and 1960s, the population
of blind youth was no longer concentrated in schools for the blind. While
blind people had more opportunities to enter mainstream society, they were
increasingly isolated from one another. Broader outreach strategies were
required to find blind adults and young people scattered in cities and towns
from Maine to Arizona.

 

Dr. Jacobus tenBroek was an educator and a theorist. He devoted most of his
efforts to developing a set of guiding principles and a structure to bring
blind people together. Dr. Jernigan emphasized forming a community, and he
used a personal approach. He started the practice of visiting people in
their homes to introduce them to the Federation. He showed people not only
what the NFB could do for them, but also what they could do for the NFB.
When he became president, Dr. Jernigan built upon this approach. He formed
organizing teams to search the country for members and leaders.

 

Diane McGeorge of Colorado joined the organization in the 1970s after she
witnessed a powerful show of solidarity. "I knew about the NFB long before I
became active in it," she recalled. 

 

My husband, Ray, was very involved, but I tended to concentrate on raising
the children. The turning point for me was the Judy Miller case.4 Judy
Miller, an experienced teacher, wanted to teach in the Denver school system.
The Denver school board refused to give her the opportunity to teach because
she could not meet the local vision requirement. I understood that this was
discrimination. I had faced discrimination myself when I was not permitted
to take my guide dog into various locations. Ray had faith that Dr. Jernigan
would help us, and he did. I was impressed by the blind teachers who put
their personal lives on hold to come from across the country to help Judy by
demonstrating their capabilities. The Denver school board settled the case
the day before the trial was schedule to start. This incident convinced me
that the NFB had the power to improve lives, and I wanted to be part of this
movement.5

 

After a year of futile discussion, Judy Miller and the NFB brought suit
against the Denver school board on June 28, 1973. The case was finally
settled on April 21, 1975. It was a landmark victory in the federal court
that struck down an enormous barrier of employment discrimination. It is
easy to understand why Diane McGeorge was impressed with the determination
of the NFB. Years later she said, 

 

When Dr. Jernigan called me and said that he wanted me to be part of an
organizing team, I jumped at the chance. I now recognized that the NFB
changed people's lives. I enjoyed meeting other blind people, listening to
their stories, and bringing them hope. Dr. Jernigan called me every day and
said, "did you find the state president yet?" The work was both very
challenging and very rewarding. Dr. Jernigan gave me the confidence to find
that state president, and in turn, I gave that state president the
encouragement and tools to build up the state affiliate.6

 

The members of the organizing teams gained valuable firsthand experience in
identifying and cultivating leadership. Ever Lee Hairston offers the
following perspective on how an organizing team found her in the 1980s.

 

Jacqueline Billey was working on membership development in New Jersey. When
she called me, I knew nothing about the NFB. She asked my ideas about a
meeting place, and I was glad to help. I liked Jackie very much, but the
first meeting did not excite me. Jackie was a persuasive woman, and she kept
inviting me to the national convention. I was a single parent raising my
son. I had recently started a new job. I made other excuses and kept putting
her off. Jackie was a determined woman and she persisted. I finally agreed
to go for three or four days.

 

At the convention Jackie took me under her wing and made those few days a
memorable experience. I was overwhelmed. I also recognized what I was
missing because of my lack of blindness skills. In the registration line,
when I was asked whether I wanted a print or a Braille agenda, I understood
that I was illiterate. I could no longer read print and did not know how to
read Braille. I wanted what the blind people around me had.

 

When I came back from that convention in 1987, I immediately started a local
chapter of the NFB in Cherry Hill, New Jersey. I had leadership ability and
experience before I joined the NFB. What the Federation gave me was hope and
a cause. I acquired blindness skills at the Louisiana Center for the Blind.
I became determined, and still am, to give back the love and hope that I
received to other blind people.7

 

Caption: Jason Ewell addresses a group of NFB Corps volunteers seated around
a table.

 

Students have always played an important role in the NFB. Dr. Jernigan made
sure that students were part of organizing teams. He wanted to harness their
energy and enthusiasm and to broaden their experience. When he became
president, Dr. Maurer followed this practice as well, establishing the NFB
Corps. As NFB Corps members, students and recent college graduates traveled
the country, seeking out blind people and building new NFB chapters.

 

In 2003 Jennifer Kennedy, today a nationally certified orientation and
mobility instructor in Virginia, spent six weeks working with NFB Corps
outside Frederick, Maryland. As a recent graduate of the Louisiana Center
for the Blind, she put her new skills to the test. "I remember the copious
amounts of hardcopy Braille, looking at the Braille Monitor and Future
Reflections [mailing] lists. We were just calling people and trying to meet
other blind people." 

 

At one point, one of Kennedy's team members, Sandy Halverson, got frustrated
with the tomes of data that weren't in a manageable format. With a slate and
stylus she copied all of the names and phone numbers onto individual index
cards. "At times, it was discouraging," Kennedy said. "People would hang up
on you, they'd say they had a previous run-in with a consumer organization
that they didn't like, or the contact info would just be wrong. Without a
strong level of dedication to the organization, we wouldn't have been
successful."

 

However, the end result was worth the effort. As Kennedy said, 

 

A year later, in 2004, I was working the Independence Market [at national
convention] when I saw some of the guys that I had recruited to join.
Actually, one of them was a guy who we invited to go to karaoke with us,
just to show that we're an organization for all kinds of people! I was
excited that at least the chapter [we started] was still in existence a year
later and had brought new people to the national convention. Hiring a driver
from this town in the middle of nowhere to come to [convention in]
Louisville was exciting to me. I saw other people believe in something that
I believed in so early in my life and appreciated that they wanted to see
what was happening nationally.8

 

Caption: Surrounded by members of her delegation, Lydia Usero holds the
charter of the NFB of Puerto Rico at the 1992 NFB Convention.

 

The NFB grew to fifty-two affiliates when the NFB of Puerto Rico received
its charter of affiliation in 1992. Although the organization no longer adds
affiliates, it continues to grow by strengthening those that exist. The
Seventy-five Days of Action in 2015 is the most recent example of our
ongoing search for members and leaders. In many ways, this organizing effort
was similar to the system that Dr. Jernigan began in the 1950s. With the
idea of creating seventy-five new chapters nationwide in honor of the
organization's anniversary, members made personal contacts with blind people
and visited them in their homes. This organizing effort had the advantage of
advances in communication such as social media, which were used to encourage
simultaneous organizing in all fifty-two affiliates. As Jeannie Massay, one
of the co-chairs of the Seventy-five Days of Action Committee, explained, 

 

We empowered individuals in every affiliate to go out and spread the word
about our positive philosophy of blindness. People who did not think of
themselves as leaders found that they could help to organize a new local
chapter or strengthen an existing chapter. By empowering individuals and by
focusing on building membership, we were able to strengthen and rejuvenate
the organization.9

 

Tracy Soforenko, who serves as the second vice president of the NFB of
Virginia, shared Jeannie Massay's ideology. Early in his presidency of the
Potomac Chapter, he wanted every person to have a job, no matter how small.
"I would find that some people would take a job and do great things, and
others would, well, not do so well," he said. "But then I got to thinking:
if a fundraiser didn't happen or wasn't perfect, it didn't matter. We were
teaching blind people that they could do stuff and that their work mattered.
Slowly people got better, our events improved, and we became a stronger
chapter."10 The work itself was secondary; the mentoring was primary.

 

As proof of that idea, Mr. Soforenko encouraged a member to take on a big
role, one in which he knew that she would excel and grow. "This young
individual felt as if she'd never been given a leadership role in an
organization of our size, and we asked her to serve as our treasurer,
responsible for administering our $5,000-plus annual budget," he said. "Our
chapter provided some coaching along the way about how to handle different
situations, and within just a few months, she was giving us advice about how
to better manage and account for our funds."11 The search for leaders and
members of the Federation will continue. More blind people will be
empowered, developing a stronger pool of leaders.

 


Developing Leaders Through Mentoring Relationships


 

Developing strong mentoring relationships between teachers and students has
been central to the NFB since its inception. Dr. Newel Perry convinced his
student, Jacobus tenBroek, to form the NFB in 1940. Perry and tenBroek
worked closely together for many years. Because of their presence and
activity, Federation leadership was initially centered in California. Later,
when Kenneth Jernigan became president, the center of NFB leadership shifted
to Iowa.

 

Through the early decades of the movement, talented leaders emerged
infrequently. They were swiftly brought into the circle of leadership, where
everyone knew and worked closely with everyone else. In the 1970s, local
chapters proliferated, and membership throughout the country grew rapidly.
This unprecedented growth created a need for more leaders. Dr. Jernigan
determined that leadership training had to change to meet the rising
demands.

 

In 1973 President Jernigan organized the first NFB Leadership Training
Seminar. These seminars were destined to become a permanent fixture in the
movement. By 1990 representatives from every state had participated.
Leadership was no longer clustered in one state. Because of these seminars,
the NFB developed a truly national leadership base.

 

Caption: Dr. Marc Maurer conducts a meeting of the Timid Seminar in 1991.

 

The intensity of the seminar experience helped the participants form strong
bonds of friendship and camaraderie. In Walking Alone and Marching Together,
the history written for the fiftieth anniversary of the NFB, Dr. Floyd
Matson described the mechanics of the leadership training seminars as
follows: 

 

The seminarians lived and learned and worked together for four active days,
at close quarters with one another and with the national president (first
Kenneth Jernigan and later Marc Maurer). They came to know the institutional
workings of the national headquarters; they learned the history of the
movement from the people who made it; they mastered the structure of the
basic laws governing work with the blind, and they reasoned through (and
talked and argued through) the handling of hundreds of problematic
situations drawn from actual experience which were posed to them by the
president. These contingencies gave the new leaders an opportunity to ponder
issues of administration, of policy-making, of finance, and of the routine
daily tasks of keeping a movement composed mainly of volunteers working
happily along toward its goals.12

 

Dr. Fredric Schroeder, who served for many years as the Federation's first
vice president and attended over thirty leadership seminars, said the goal
was to connect the national president to members around the country. As
Schroeder explained, 

 

Rather than seeing the national office and the president as having this wide
range of responsibilities for managing the organization, these were times to
realize that we're a people's movement. A big goal was getting to know Dr.
Maurer beyond his formal role as president. People needed to be comfortable
to pick up the phone to call the national president to say, "Here's an issue
that we're dealing with," or "Here's info that I think would be helpful to
you." We're not only colleagues engaged in a common cause, but we're friends
who care about one another. We want the abstract philosophy of the
Federation to be successful, and our lives are the embodiment of that. 

 

Dr. Schroeder continued, 

 

By extension, participants came to an understanding that, as we assume
leadership positions, our actions become actions that represent the
Federation at the local, state, or national board levels. In other words,
when we as individuals articulate a position on any topic related to
blindness, people in leadership are speaking for the whole organization. We
can't say, "The Federation believes X and I believe Y." It can't work that
way. If I am part of the central administration, I can do my best to
influence our positions through the democratic process, but once a course is
determined, we need to support it and make it work. We can't be part of the
central leadership, then divorce ourselves when we feel like it.13

 

Leadership training seminars had a strong effect on individual participants.
In the January/February 1999 edition of the Braille Monitor, in an article
entitled "Words from Colleagues Old and New," Mary Ellen Gabias shared
recollections of her leadership training seminar experience. She remembered
the experience vividly, though it had occurred twenty-six years earlier. 

 

We started before eight in the morning and finished at ten in the evening.
Dr. Jernigan showed me a thick stack of index cards with items he meant to
cover. From time to time during the three days of the seminar he would walk
over to my chair and show me how many items we had completed and how much
was still left to do. There was more to do than we could possibly get done.
That's the way it always is in the Federation. We worked hard, laughed a
lot, and cried sometimes.

 

The experience changed the way I thought about myself. I began to understand
that Dr. Jernigan could not carry the load alone. He could write and speak
about blindness better than anyone else; his thinking was innovative; his
courage was beyond question; but he also needed my help. He had shown me
what the Federation meant to blind people. He had given the deepest and best
part of himself to the movement. He had ceased to be an intimidating
stranger and become a trusted friend.14

 

A second example of developing leaders through mentoring relationships began
with the expansion of the NFB National Scholarship Program in 1984. The
National Scholarship program began in 1965 with the Howard Brown Rickard
Scholarship, awarded to a blind student studying law or science. Over the
years, the scholarship program grew with the addition of the Melva T. Owen
Scholarship, and in the early 1980s two Hermione Grant Calhoun Scholarships.
In 1983 the NFB awarded four scholarships at the convention banquet. The
board of directors greatly expanded the National Scholarship program in
1984. At the convention banquet, twenty scholarships were awarded to blind
students.

 

In 1984 President Kenneth Jernigan appointed a committee not only to select
the scholarship recipients, but also to mentor them and encourage them to
join and fully participate in the movement. This practice continues to the
present day. A testament to the effectiveness of the National Scholarship
program as a leadership training tool is the number of national board
members who got their start in the Federation as scholarship winners.
Current board members who won NFB National Scholarships include Pam Allen,
James Brown, Patti Gregory-Chang, and Jeannie Massay.

 

With the Scholarship Class of 1984 began the practice of assisting the
finalists to attend the national convention. (Finalists are not declared
winners until they actually receive their awards at the convention banquet.)
The Federation continued to increase both the number of scholarships and the
amount of each grant. In 1985, the number of scholarships rose to
twenty-five. In 1989 the NFB offered twenty-six scholarships. In 2000 the
number of scholarships was expanded to thirty, the number awarded in 2015. 

 

Caption: The NFB National Scholarship Class of 2012 gathers in the
convention ballroom.

 

During the convention each scholarship finalist meets with a different
mentor each day. These mentors, who are members of the National Scholarship
Committee, have the opportunity to explain the workings of our organization
and connect students with valuable resources. As Ron Gardner of Utah puts
it, the committee brings up the next generation of leaders "by meeting
people where they are." A former president of our Utah affiliate who served
as a member of the scholarship committee for many years, Gardner said the
mentoring can never start with judgment. It must begin with mutual respect
and motivation.15

 

In many cases, positive mentoring relationships keep scholarship winners
involved in the organization even after they cash their checks. Corbb
O'Connor recalled, 

 

I grew up calling myself "visually impaired," so throughout my first
convention as a scholarship winner in 2006, I didn't see how I could fit in
with all these blind people. On the last day of that convention, I asked Jim
Marks, my mentor, how somebody who still saw a little could call himself
"blind." He told me that most people in the convention hall could see
something, even if it was just light, yet blindness doesn't have to mean
utter darkness. He asked me, "How will we ever change what it means to be
blind in this country if we're all afraid to use the word?" From that day
onward, I have considered myself "blind" and a proud member of our movement.


 


Experience Is the Best Teacher


 

To be effective, leaders must have experience. Allen Harris, a longtime
leader in many states who served on the national board of directors and as
national treasurer, offered the following perspective. 

 

If you want to help someone develop into a leader, you must trust him enough
to give him experience. You must also undue any damage if things don't work
out. It is challenging to find the right balance. Leadership in the NFB must
be earned. It is not an entitlement. Standing for election keeps NFB leaders
grounded in the knowledge that we must produce results to stay in office.
However, we must not leave elections to chance. We must provide experience
to help leaders get ready for a given position. Since we live in an
imperfect world, leaders sometimes have to step in and learn the job as they
go. Since we care about each other and are dedicated to the movement, we
always find ways to help that new leader out. Recognizing talent and
allowing it to blossom is an essential ingredient in our success 

 

 

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