by Susan Glass
It seems fitting that the Fresno chapter of CCB, now about to launch its third "Dining In The Dark" fundraiser, should have an aspiring chef as its
president, and a dynamic story teller and motivated Membership Chair as its vice president. Food, stories, community fellowship, and community service
are the watch words of the Fresno chapter of CCB.
According to Sarah Harris, who has served as chapter Vice President for the past year, recruiting people for the Dining In The dark events has been surprisingly
easy. Families, friends and church members all attend. President Nathan Romo said that fellow students at his cooking school bought a table, and so did
his stepmother and her colleagues who work at an art gallery.
"Our first event was catered," said Sarah, "but we held our second one at Yosemite Falls Restaurant, and the staff as well as our diners really got into
the experience. The evening was full of surprises. People you didn't expect to put on blindfolds and eat the meal were the ones who did." What truly inspired
and moved the sighted participants however were the stories that blind chapter members told about their lives while the meal was in progress.
"Our member William Eliot told his story about how a can of beans changed his life," Sarah said. "He was standing near a market shelf looking at the beans
and everything went dark." Another chapter member told diners about coping with glaucoma. Then Debbie Flowers described her experiences as a teacher of
the visually impaired, and one of her students present at the meal is also a member of our chapter." Hopefully, the sighted attendees ended their evening
meal with deeper, more positive impressions of blindness than when they sat down to dinner.
Thus the dining in the dark events themselves were a service to the community. But the Fresno chapter also used the proceeds from their fund raisers for
additional community service. Recently they purchased an iPad mini for a blind high school student. And they're active in the larger community in other
ways too. Not long ago, three chapter members participated in an event sponsored by Blind Babies Foundation called Walk In My Shoes. Sarah, who is a mother
herself to her 12-year-old daughter, hopes that chapter members can become mentors to families with blind children.
"We need to be out in the wider Fresno community," says President Nathan Romo. "We need to be visible, known." Sarah Harris agrees. "We as blind and
visually impaired people need to teach the community. We can't expect someone to know what we need. We should use moments when we're frustrated as teachable
moments. Like when you go to a doctor's appointment, and a nurse grabs your arm instead of allowing you to take hers. That's a teachable moment."
President Nathan Romo and Vice President Sarah Harris both feel that growing chapter membership is a challenge, as is balancing the needs of chapter members,
some seek a local focus, some want to connect more with CCB and ACB, and some are just looking for a social outlet. They'd love to see more blind people
in their twenties and thirties who could join their chapter and be active in it.
Both Nathan and Sarah would like to see CCB use social media more in reaching out to members. Specifically, they'd like to see a CCB Membership handbook
available in digital formats, and available through social media. "This is a digital world," says Sarah. "The more we can get things like documents in
a digital format, the faster we can read them, and act on them."
Of course, not everyone chooses to board every digital train, so braille, and large print, and telephone calls, and good old face to face contact will
continue to be mainstays in the Fresno chapter of CCB, and most likely in all of our CCB chapters.
