Monday, April 1, 2013

Volunteer Sighted Guides Needed For Blind Inviduals

Getting from point A to point B can be challenging some days for anyone right? Well imagine being blind and trying to get to work or school or just go grocery shopping everyday. Or going to special events. Inland Northwest Lighthouse has an outstanding volunteer opportunity to become a trained Sighted Guide for individuals who are blind. This is really cool and I'd recommend you do it if you'd like to volunteer but don't have a lot of time to do it.

The contact person for this is Shawn Dobbs, who is on our Transportation Advisory Committee (TAC). I talked to him last week about this and he said they occasionally need sighted people to help folks like himself get to special meetings, especially when he is working as an advocate and talking to elected officials. The beauty of this is that you would get to go interesting places with an intersting person and it's not a full time or even part time job. And it would be immediately rewarding.

Training is April 17 from  1:00-3:30 p.m.   For more information contact Shawn at 509-487-0405 or sdobbs@seattlelh.org. He'll hook you up.

2 comments:

Charles said...

A friend of mine was talking about the Lighthouse blind, and he said the Model T-A clubs have had a rally, where the navigator is a blind person reading the instructions in brail as they go on the rally. They tell where to turn etc.

SRTC Staff said...

Someone else told me about that too! They said it was really fun, although a little unnerving. I can imagine. Lighthouse is having a groundbreaking in April for the expansion to their facility that I believe is open to the public and will include blindfolding sighted participants and having them walk a course of some sort. I'm going to try to talk my boss into going and doing it :)


About SRTC

SRTC is the federally designated Metropolitan Planning Organization (MPO) for Spokane County. Urbanized areas with populations exceeding 50,000 people are required to have an MPO. SRTC was formed to address the county's transportation planning needs. It provides coordination in planning between the public, cities, small towns, the county, the state, transit providers, and tribes.

SRTC offers services including transportation monitoring, transportation modeling, census information analysis, travel demand forecasting, historical traffic count analysis, geographic information systems, and trip generation rates.