1. Hello ACB Voters,
I am Penny Reeder, and I am running for a second term on ACB’s Board of Publications. I have enjoyed serving over the past three years, and I am proud of the board’s work to assure that our publications amplify our members voices, communicate our values, expand public awareness of ACB and the positive differences our organization makes for our community, and reflect currently accepted standards of accessibility, quality, and style. In ACB, the authority of leadership is derived from the members. A successful democracy depends upon an informed electorate. This is the principle that motivates my service on the Board of Publications.
ACB’s success is largely dependent upon the degree to which our members feel that their voices are important and that they can be heard, the positive attention we are able to attract in the public arena, and our success in advocating for our civil rights. I am excited to participate on a board that strives to uphold ACB’s core values and achieve these outcomes. I ASK FOR YOUR VOTE SO I CAN CONTINIUE THIS WORK.
2. My contributions to ACB at every level derive from my deeply felt commitment to supporting our community and advocating for the independence, safety, and good quality of life that we all desire as people who are blind. Originally, I was drawn to the organization as an occasional reader of The Braille Forum. I met several ACB members at a conference in the late 1990s, and they persuaded me to join the old ACB-L e-mail discussion list. As I met a larger and more diverse group of ACB members online, it didn’t take me very long to realize that, after many years of knowing very few other blind people, I had found a home. I joined my local ACB chapter, the Maryland and DC state affiliates, worked briefly for ACB, and over time, have been active in six special-interest affiliates.
Many ACB achievements that improve our lives today were launched during the years when I was one of the ACB staff members who worked to promote audio description on TV and in the movies, to encourage diversity within ACB by supporting new affiliates like BFLAG (now BPI) and the Alliance on Aging and Vision Loss, to launch a media revolution with the creation of ACB Radio, to teach our members how to advocate for accessible pedestrian signals, and to promote consumer choice as a guiding principle of vocational rehabilitation. We discussed, sometimes debated, and thoroughly covered all of these projects within the pages of the Braille Forum and on the ACB e-mail discussion lists. The ACB Board of Publications supported that comprehensive level of communication then, and as a member of the BOP today, I am proud that the Board of Publications continues that tradition.
3. Although ACB faces challenges with respect to attracting new members and raising funding to achieve organizational goals, we have seldom been in a better position to embrace those challenges than the one we’re in today, as the pandemic recedes. During possibly the darkest year in our 60-year history, we have rediscovered our strength in community. Our challenge is to broaden that community by reaching out to blind and visually impaired people who don’t necessarily look like the majority of us, or share the same cultural backgrounds, or perhaps even yet share our commonly held beliefs in the very real possibilities of living independently and safely and well while blind. As we support one another, our community will continue to grow, our relationships with one another will deepen and become even more meaningful, and the wider world will get to know us better. We will tell our stories in community calls, online and through social media, with blogs and our magazine, our podcasts, and on all of those fascinating ACB Radio streams. ACB Media will become a reality, our hybrid conventions will thrive, and the care and concern that we share with one another now will strengthen our advocacy and encourage the sighted world to look toward ACB as an organization of people who insist on inclusion, opportunity, and self-determination
The Board of Publications can help members — high-tech and low-tech and no-tech, guide dog users and cane travelers, readers of braille and large print, people who are black and white and brown and all the shades of humanity, rich people, poor people, straight and gay and everywhere in-between people, those new to blindness and those blind from birth — to tell our stories well, and find fulfillment in community. As one member of the BOP, this is my goal.