Employment: Senior Accessibility Analyst in Digital Technology, United Airlines, Chicago, IL
Office I’m running for: Second Vice President, American Council of the Blind
1. My name is Ray Campbell, and I am seeking the office of Second Vice President of the American Council of the Blind (ACB). I have held this position for the past two years, and if ever there were two more years of challenge for organizations like ACB, I haven’t seen them. ACB is in a great place, and I want to continue serving on the leadership team that has helped us get there. Financially, we are a strong organization, having been able to hire several more professional staff in both our Alexandria, Virginia and Brooklyn Center, Minnesota offices. These new staff members will help maintain the vital, day to day focus we need on ACB’s programs and services. We’ve become more connected than ever before, adding many new ACB members and introducing countless others to ACB from across the United States and around the world. I feel that my experience serving as Second Vice President for the past two years puts me in a good position to help ACB continue to move forward. I said we’re in a great place, but it took hard work to get there. If we want to maintain our prominence and expand what we can offer individuals who are blind or visually impaired, those of us charged with leading ACB need to be prepared to continue working hard and I am ready to do that. Prior to my serving as Second Vice President, I served as ACB Secretary for six years. I’ve also chaired the Constitution and Bylaws Committee, served on the Resolutions Committee, and served as both President and Treasurer for the Illinois Council of the Blind, among many other things.
2. There are many contributions I’ve helped to make that I consider strong. I’ll discuss two of them here. From about September 2017 through April or May of 2018, I served as part of a team evaluating the new ACB Website as it was being built for accessibility. Thanks to the work of our team, identifying and documenting issues and reporting them to the ACB staff so they could be shared with Louisville Web Group, when the new www.acb.org launched in 2018, it launched with very few accessibility issues for users who are blind or visually impaired. This helped make the conversion to the new site easier for our users.
In 2020, President Dan Spoone asked me to co-chair a task force to take a look at ACB’s Resolutions Process. This task force has prepared a report, available on the ACB Website with recommendations on how we can make the resolutions process easier for our members and less taxing on the Resolutions Committee. The recommendations we’ve brought forward will help members better understand each resolution, be able to ask questions about them and recommend changes. It is my hope that as members, especially our newer ones, become familiar with the resolutions process that they will offer up resolutions to guide ACB in its policy and advocacy work.
3. I believe ACB’s biggest challenge going forward is to maintain the connections so many have made with ACB and each other over the past year. The COVID-19 Pandemic, in some ways, was great for ACB, because it forced us to keep our members and friends engaged in ways other than gathering in person. Thanks to the thousands of community events we’ve held, our presence on social media, and our willingness to embrace new platforms like Clubhouse, we are reaching far more individuals who are blind or visually impaired, many of whom never heard of ACB before. The question is, how do we maintain those connections and keep those new members we’ve gained. It certainly can’t be by going back to how we did things pre-Pandemic. As things start to return to normal across the country and the world, and in-person conventions, affiliate and chapter meetings and social events resume, we must still be prepared to offer a robust set of educational and social opportunities for those who need or want to connect virtually. We need to insure, from our national conference and convention to affiliate conventions and chapter meetings, those in attendance can participate equally, whether in-person or virtually. That will take both human and financial resources, but these are investments we need to be prepared to make in the future of ACB. I will continue to support the growth of the ACB Community, and offer my human and financial resources to it. I will participate as much as I can on the various platforms ACB is active on. Finally, I will do all I can to make sure all attendees at future ACB events can equally participate, whether in-person or virtually.