1. My name is Mark Richert, and it is a privilege to currently serve as ACB’s First Vice President; it would be an honor to continue in this service. Professionally, I am currently serving as the Interim Executive Director for the Association for Education and Rehabilitation of the Blind and Visually Impaired (AER) and as the Director of Public Policy for VisionServe Alliance, the national association of vision loss community organizations in which both ACB and AER are active members.
When I and my fellow Board leaders were elected in Rochester, we all said that we wanted to get to work on a host of critical priorities. We said we wanted to better promote the vibrancy of our State and Special Interest Affiliates, and I believe we’ve made measurable progress. We said we wanted to intentionally welcome and empower the next generation of current and potential ACB members into the mission and work of our organization, and we have begun to more fully live out that commitment. We said we wanted to be relentless in promoting a true sense of community and to connect more effectively both with individual ACB members who may not have felt fully valued and with individual members and non-members alike that we should have been thoughtfully reaching out to all along. And in the face of unprecedented challenges, I believe we have made truly game changing progress in this regard. I’ll have more to say below about the challenges we have yet to fully meet, but it is the unqualified success of the teamwork of your national leaders, in full partnership with our dedicated staff, members and Affiliates, that gives me confidence in our shared strength to meet the challenges ahead if we maintain continuity in our commitment along with an adventurous spirit to innovate.
2. My single most significant contribution to ACB is my integrity of purpose; the three most relevant components of my character are my vision for what could be, my competence to execute strategy, and my courage in the face of the odds. I have been a Life Member of ACB since 1996, Chair of ACB’s Resolutions Committee for seven years, and active in ACB at the local, state and national level throughout my adult life. Indeed, I have had the pleasure of serving ACB from, as it were, both within and without. Over the course of my 28-year-long career, it has been my honor to work in the policy, strategy, and leadership arenas for the national groups in our field (including for ACB as our first Director of Advocacy Services) who collectively have truly “made a difference” for all of us.
Each one of us has unique gifts and talents to offer our world, our community, and our much-loved organization. For some, such contributions take the form of diligent and thankless work behind the scenes. Still others have mastery of the art of mobilizing the efforts of others to get the job done. Some people are bakers, some organize the bake sale, some put the promo materials together, some set up the tables and do the cleanup, and some maintain the bookkeeping. My contribution is in helping all of us figure out whether, when, where, and most importantly why we should do the bake sale in the first place and how to make it better than all the others in the neighborhood, or maybe even on the planet. All systems change, whether the system is a nation, a program, or a consumer organization, starts with an idea that must then be consensus-inspiring, operationalized, and championed. That is what I do.
3. I suppose the best way that I would frame ACB’s most significant challenge would be along these lines: To maintain cohesion and further build a sense of community while celebrating our diversity, honoring our history, and embracing a vision for our future wherein we warmly welcome people, partnerships and priorities that promote our shared values but push us out of our comfort zones. I know, too wordy, too vague, but hopefully not too ambitious. I’ll try to be more practical.
In what is a very tough and contentious time in our country, we must do more where diversity, equity and inclusion are concerned, but to have integrity, such important work cannot be reduced to cliches or be allowed to promote one less privileged segment of our community over another; we are all in this together. In an organization of women and men who have largely fully embraced blindness with a capital B, if we want to reach and serve the largest population of people with vision loss who could also swell our membership rosters, then we’re going to have to reach out to older Americans in word and deed in ways that may not come naturally to us but which they can relate to. In an organization that needs experienced leadership, we need to kick open doors of leadership development and actual enfranchisement to fresher faces. While empowering Special Interest Affiliates, we should be rewarding both their unique contributions as well as their tangible willingness to break down silos. There are many more examples, but for me, the bottom line is about articulating messages, shaping organizational structures and processes, and making investments of human and financial resources that foster, and hold us all accountable for, transformative results. I know we’re up to these challenges if we’re willing to address them.