[Nfbwv-talk] President Riccobono's Notebook for 6/19/17

Wed Jun 21 19:13:20 UTC 2017

June 19, 2017
President's Notebook
National Federation of the Blind
Mark A. Riccobono
officeofthepresident at nfb.org<mailto:officeofthepresident at nfb.org>
(410) 659-9314

Dear Fellow Federationists,

In three weeks we will be together in Orlando. I hope you are as energized as I am about our upcoming family reunion. There are a few things to get done before we get to our national convention.

I am aware that many affiliates of the National Federation of the Blind have received a message from Sharla Glass (sglass at envisionamerica.com) with a subject line of: Can we get your endorsement for Medication Safety for the Blind Awareness Week?

A number of you have thoughtfully written to me asking if this is an effort the Federation endorses. Our communications team is planning to put together some suggested social media engagement. We do not recommend that affiliates sign on as a sponsor of this project. Please allow us to coordinate at the national level. Most importantly, we want to make sure we are promoting the broad area of access to prescription information that is consistent with our messaging rather than promoting any particular product.

I have written to first-time delegates to the convention inviting them to a conference call next week. If we missed you by mistake, please drop me a note so we can send you the calendar invite.

All convention delegates should be on the watch for another message coming soon regarding business on the convention floor.

Critical Actions This Week:

Legislative Alert:
H.R. 620, the ADA Education and Reform Act, will be voted on in committee (referred to as markup) over the next week or two. If passed, this legislation will dramatically weaken the ADA, hindering education, employment, and community participation for all people with disabilities. The bill prevents people with disabilities from filing a lawsuit regarding an ADA violation until the person first notifies the violator. The violator then has 60 days to respond and then has another 120 days to remedy the problem, for a total delay of 180 days.

Does it make sense to wait 180 days for accessible instructional material? By then, the class will be over. How about waiting 180 days for an accessible job application? By then the job will be filled. How about waiting 180 days at the doctor's office for an accessible check-in kiosk? Furthermore, this legislation will do nothing to stop so-called frivolous lawsuits, which will still be valid under state law. Businesses do not need more time to comply with the ADA-they have had twenty-seven years already.

Please call your representative and urge them to oppose H.R. 620, the ADA Education and Reform Act. And if your representative has not cosponsored one of our other three bills, also urge them to do so. Congress will be back in session for the next two weeks but please try to make your calls and send your emails by Friday, June 22. A short summary of each bill is included below. I have also included a list of all the current cosponsors. The best way to contact your member of Congress is to call the Capitol Switchboard at (202) 224-3121 and ask for the office in question. Emailing your member of Congress is also a good idea. If you do so, please copy JPare at nfb.org<mailto:JPare at nfb.org>.

It is critical that we shut down H.R. 620. In addition, we are hoping to significantly raise the number of cosponsors on all of our bills before convention but we cannot do it without everyone working together. Your calls and emails make a big difference.

News:

Click-to-Give Campaign:

Our Imagination Fund Committee is pleased to announce a Click-to-Give campaign that we will kick off at our national convention. Click-to-Give allows anyone to make a donation to the National Federation of the Blind. This is an opportunity for us to identify those individuals who are not members of the organization but want to support the good work that we do. We need your help identifying individuals in your extended network of family, friends, colleagues, and service providers. Their gift will assist a newly blinded person with independent travel through our Free White Cane Program, help a child to learn to read through our Braille Reading Pals Club, assist blind veterans to regain their independence, and so much more. How you can help: please take the time to share the names and email addresses of potential supporters by visiting https://nfb.org/give2017. When the campaign starts, we will send an email inviting all of these individuals to share in the great things we do every day to help blind people live the lives we want.

New Exhibit on tenBroek Now Available:
The tenBroek Library is pleased to announce that a new digital exhibit on the life and work of our founder, Jacobus tenBroek, is now available online through Digital Maryland, part of the Digital Public Library of America. This exhibit mainly focuses upon Dr. tenBroek's life outside of his work with the NFB and the organized blind movement, including his post-secondary education, initial struggles to find work as a blind man, teaching career, family life, and research projects. These specially selected records span the years 1938-1967 and provide a unique glimpse at his personality, sense of humor, and intelligence. Some materials also touch on the events of the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley in the mid-1960s. Each document has been scanned, transcribed, and rendered as plain text to ensure accessibility. The exhibit is available online at http://collections.digitalmaryland.org/cdm/landingpage/collection/nfjt. If you have any questions or experience problems trying to access the exhibit, please contact Anna Kresmer at akresmer at nfb.org<mailto:akresmer at nfb.org> or (410) 659-9314, extension 2310.

Dates to Keep in Mind:

  *   July 10-15, 2017: National Convention, Rosen Shingle Creek Resort, Orlando, Florida<https://nfb.org/images/nfb/publications/bm/bm16/bm1611/bm161101.htm>
  *   July 23-29, 2017: Youth Slam<http://www.blindscience.org/nfb-youth-slam>, Towson University
  *   September 12-17, 2017: BLAST<http://blindmerchants.org/blast-2017/>, Nashville, Tennessee

The National Federation of the Blind knows that blindness is not the characteristic that defines you or your future. Every day we raise the expectations of blind people, because low expectations create obstacles between blind people and our dreams. You can live the life you want; blindness is not what holds you back.

Mark A. Riccobono
President
200 East Wells Street, Baltimore, MD 21230
(410) 659-9314 | officeofthepresident at nfb.org<mailto:officeofthepresident at nfb.org>

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