Vol. 11 No. 1 - Winter 2010

Employee and Community Services News

Employee and Community Services has been busy over the past year! We provided braille and computer classes to employees at the Lighthouse, as well as Orientation and Mobility training so that people can travel safely and independently to work and in their communities. The Seabeck Deaf-Blind Retreat was a smashing success, as were the Deaf-Blind Community Classes, and Braille Retreats!

While reflecting on the many accomplishments of the past year, we have many exciting new opportunities to look forward to in the year ahead.

The new Braille Reading Library will be up and running soon! We are very excited to have a dedicated space for braille learning and reading! Julie Brannon is busily ordering magazines, books and other braille materials to stock the library, and we also will have books on loan from the Washington Talking Book & Braille Library (WTBBL). This is a wonderful opportunity to partner with WTBBL and for us to have books in our library we otherwise would not have the opportunity to stock. Look for Julie in her new BRL space in January! And for those of you familiar with braille, you will recognize the acronym BRL (Braille Reading Library) is the contracted word for braille.

In October we welcomed Valarie Moser to the Lighthouse Employee and Community Services Deparment, as our new Accessibility Manager. Valarie will be overseeing the creation and maintenance of fully accessible environments for Lighthouse employees. She will also be implementing an accommodations procedure at all our locations. Welcome Valarie!

We are honored to partner with Guide Dogs for the Blind to provide a home base for their new Northwest Field Manager, Carrie Skym. She will provide support and training to Guide Dog users in the Puget Sound area, as well as answering the 800 line for Guide Dogs for the Blind. She joins us once a week, providing support to Lighthouse employees and others in community. We welcome Carrie and the opportunity to forge a new partnership with Guide Dogs for the Blind.

The Employee & Community Services Department and the Deaf-Blind Program are working closely with an Ad Hoc committee comprised of board and community members to work on our Strategic Planning goal of providing 500 livable wage jobs by Dec. 31st, 2016. This exciting process brings together a very talented and committed group of people with creative ideas that will help us move forward in meeting our future goals. We look forward to working with them and incorporating the new ideas and directions they will bring forward.

~Amy Koehl

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