President’s Address

Parenting a child is always difficult.  We hear so much conflicting advice and worry everyday if we’re doing the right thing for our children.

Parenting a child with an impairment has a way of amplifying those feelings of paranoia and anxiety, sometimes causing parents to feel isolated from their peers.  Feeling alone and isolated is how I felt before VIEWS.  I lived in a small bubble, locking myself away from other parents.  I did not want to bring my son to playdates because I found that I could not stop feeling sad about the developmental milestones that other children his age were reaching.

What I have found since joining VIEWS is a community of people with a shared experience and wealth of knowledge that has helped me and will continue to help me throughout my son’s life.

My vision for VIEWS is to create an even stronger community that is easily accessible and links families to much-needed resources.  I would like to see us communicate with parent groups and organizations for the BLV community across the country and perhaps even internationally.  I would like to make VIEWS a strong voice for families in our province by continuing to advocate on Special Education Advisory Committees (SEACs), the provincial SEAC organization, the Ministerial Advisory Committee on Special Educations, and the Consumer Access Group.  But most importantly of all, I would like to ensure that VIEWS is serving all the needs of families with children and youth who are blind or low-vision.

We have a lot of exciting things on the go including providing input for the new accessible education act that is currently being drafted.  We’ve launched a new website with a forum to both inform and connect members, and we’ve hired an interim Executive Director to provide our organization with more support than our small but dedicated group of volunteer board members could provide.

I am hoping that with your support and input we can achieve our goals.  Look forward to hearing from you!

Best,

Claudine

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