From July 26-28, 2019, Holman Prizewinner Conchita Hernandez convened the first-ever blindness conference in Mexico led by blind people for blind kids and their families.
Conchita convened a team of fellow blindness professionals to host the conference she called Cambiando Vidas, or “Changing Lives.”
Held in Guadalajara, the Cambiando Vidas conference included breakout sessions on a variety of topics, including daily living skills, low-cost technology, employment expectations, an introduction to braille and more. 120 people attended the conference, including blind people of all ages, parents of blind children and educational and rehabilitation professionals.
“Many of the people who attended the conference hadn’t been exposed to training techniques and a blindness-positive philosophy,” says Conchita. Conchita describes witnessing the impact that this conference had on attendees. “One parent said she was anxious and upset when her daughter was born blind.” The mother’s views changed during the course of the conference. “Now, she sees the possibilities that there are for her daughter,” Conchita concludes.
Conchita shows a little girl how to use a long white cane at a school in Mexico.
Conchita is the chair of Mentoring Engaging and Teaching All Students, or METAS, an organization that works to spread blindness training and advocacy in Mexico. Conchita and her fellow METAS staff hosted the conference this year and are working to secure funding to host the conference again. Conchita, however, has a long-term dream for the conference: “The conference needs to be run by people who live in Mexico.”
The first steps to achieve that goal have already taken place. “The conference was attended by people from all over Mexico,” Conchita explains. “At the end of the conference, people from different regions in Mexico formed a committee, to fight for change and legislation,” she continues.
Conchita was one of three winners of LightHouse for the Blind’s Holman Prize for Blind Ambition in 2018. The Holman Prize for Blind Ambition is about changing the perception of blindness around the world. Conchita’s Cambiando Vidas conference clearly did just that. By bringing people together, the conference helps to raise the bar for people who are blind. This has led to attendees advocating for more opportunities for blind people in Mexico. “When people come together,” Conchita says, “they can make a big change.”
Being successful as a blind person is not about being a superhero. We often see images of people with disabilities atop mountains, creating beautiful things or connecting their community in big ways. But often the narrative is over-simplified to the exclusion of the real factors that got those people to where they are: research, planning, collaboration, humility and a whole host of other skills that maybe aren’t as glamorous as the idea of scaling a craggy peak on your own. But these are the real stories we want to hear.
Truly, every blind person has a dream and a set of proclivities, and the Holman Prize is about nurturing those passions and goals at every level. The prize does not reward superheroes; it rewards everyday people who can demonstrate a commitment to a project that is meaningful to them. That’s why, we believe, every blind person in the world should apply.
Apply in 2019
On January 15, 2019, applications open for the third annual Holman Prize for Blind Ambition, funded by the LightHouse for the Blind and Visually Impaired. This prize awards up to $25,000 each to three blind individuals who wish to push their own limits and carry out a “dream” project of their own creation.
The Holman Prize is named for 19th century explorer James Holman (“the blind traveler”), who was the first blind person to circumnavigate the globe, and the most prolific traveler of any person before the era of modern transportation.
Our inaugural prizewinners, Penny Melville-Brown, Ojok Simon and Ahmet Ustunel recently completed their year-long adventures. On November 29, they will be honored at our LightHouse Gala: A Celebration of Blind Ambition, where they will share their stories. Although their Holman year may be over, Penny, Ojok and Ahmet are determined to continue to push boundaries and change perceptions about blindness around the world.
The 2018 winners, Stacy Cervenka, Conchita Hernandez and Red Szell are just starting their Holman journeys. Each has already accomplished a great deal in the nascent days of their projects.
Stacy Cervenka: The Blind Travelers Network
Stacy is busy working with a website developer, web designer and business analyst on creating The Blind Travelers Network, an online community for blind people to crowdsource information about the accessibility of places they travel. Besides reviews, the website will allow people to communicate with each other and share their travel tips and stories through message boards and blogs. Stacy has been conducting focus groups with blind people to learn what features they would find useful on The Blind Travelers Network. She will be seeking people to test a beta version of the website towards the end of winter. The public rollout of the website will be in the spring.
Conchita Hernández: Changing lives in Mexico
Conchita will convene the first-ever blindness conference in Mexico run by blind people and registration is now open for “Cambiando Vidas” or Changing Lives, which takes place in Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico from July 26-28, 2019. Conchita is currently contracting with teachers and exhibitors. The conference will have workshops for blind people, parents of blind children, and professionals in the blindness field. Conchita explains that in Mexico, sixty percent of blind children don’t have access to an education. With Cambiando Vidas, Conchita hopes to begin a systematic change by creating a community of people and more resources to help improve prospects for blind people in Mexico.
Red Szell: An extreme triathlon in Scotland
Red is training to complete an extreme triathlon that includes off-road biking, an ocean swim and climbing a 200-foot sea stack called Am Buachaille. Recently, Red and his climbing partner Matthew traveled to Sardinia where they began climbing Le Grand Mammut, a challenging, but less difficult rock climb that would help him train for Am Buachaille. Le Grand Mammut is about 500 feet high, but at 200 feet, Red, dehydrated and with a case of sunstroke, was forced to execute an emergency rappel down the cliff with Matthew. Red reflected on the failure to summit in his blog entry, “I needed a reminder that the sport I love is more than just a physical challenge. It’s about risk analysis, problem solving and above all, partnership.”
The six Holman Prizewinners come from varied experiences and backgrounds with projects that are vastly different. From academia, to art to athleticism, the Holman Prize welcomes pitches of all kinds. Starting January 15, it’s your turn to upload a 90-second video to YouTube and fill out the official Holman Prize application.
LightHouse Staff1 Commenton Meet Conchita Hernández, teaching blindness across the border with the Holman Prize
Since 2017, LightHouse for the Blind and Visually Impaired has presented the Holman Prize, which funds the ambitions of three blind individuals each year. One of the 2018 prizewinners is Conchita Hernández, from Washington, D.C., USA. Conchita will convene the first-ever blind-led conference in Mexico devoted to bringing masses ofblind people, their families and mentors together in Guadalajara to understand there is an alternative to the traditional expectation of dependence and poverty.
Last year Conchita Hernández hosted a blindness workshop in the border town of McAllen, Texas. She wasn’t sure how many people would show up. McAllen sits on the US border with Mexico, a city surrounded on all sides by government checkpoints – a civic purgatory for undocumented immigrants who can’t move back or forward. It wasn’t clear how many blind students there were in McAllen, but, when a quality service is offered, word spreads. Sixteen families showed up, each united by the same pursuits: healthier options, better information, and a better life for their blind children.
Life is not perfect for blind children in South Texas, and many blind children still do not qualify for services in the American system because of their immigration status. The prospects in Mexico, however, are worse. Blindness alone is not a qualifier for asylum, and so many families with blind children attempt to cross the border on their own. One case, inNogales, AZ in April, saw a blind 6-year-old and her 4-year-old brother taken from their mother while she was held indefinitely.
Herself a child of immigrant parents who brought her to America at age 4, along with an older brother who is also legally blind, Conchita didn’t live the same struggle as if she had stayed in her birthplace, the Mexico City exurb of Jocotitlán. Instead, she was raised in California, learned English, made friends, went to college. By age 30, she had lived in the Bay Area, New Jersey, Nebraska, Louisiana, and ultimately settled in Washington, D.C. to pursue a doctorate and a career as an educator.
This might not have been possible had she stayed in Mexico, a country where blind people are vastly unemployed and rarely live independently. Here, blind people mostly sell government-apportioned lottery tickets and snacks on street corners and metro stations, and no education is promised. Schools for blind students are private, meaning they cost a lot of money. When they can’t afford tuition, Conchita says, families must beg public schools to accept their visually impaired children, and it doesn’t always work. “There is no ADA or IDA,” she said over the phone from DC last week. “So, a public school can just tell them, no, we don’t know how to serve you.” Despite the fact that Mexico has recently adopted some new rules and regulations regarding disability, they are little regarded or enforced.
This is why Conchita started Mentoring Engaging and Teaching All Students (METAS), a US-based nonprofit run by similarly passionate, blind, first-generation millenials who have made it their mission to empower Latin America with consistent, quality information about blindness. In multiple trips to the country, Conchita found that word spreads quickly – once families realize there are solutions they can afford. That’s the same reason that, last year when they started holding workshops on the Texas side of the border, people really showed up.
The Holman Prize will fund Conchita to take these workshops to the next level – this time, in Guadalajara, Jalisco State, a region with 8 million people and an estimated 40,000 blind residents, where she knows the people and the immense need. A center for blindness schools, Jalisco State has been called the Mexican Silicon Valley. With funding to provide staffing, lodging and scholarships, the “Changing Lives” conference (Cambiando Vidas) will be able to serve Mexican families from all over the country. “We’ll be bringing the people from Mexico together to have them access the resources and information that already exist but are unknown,” she says. “We’re going to have workshops on O&M, braille and daily living, so that they can come together in one place, learn and realize they’re not alone.”
“There really hasn’t been a blindness-focused conference run by blind people,” she says. “What’s different about this conference is that it won’t just be professionals talking at people. We’ll be having breakout sessions, as well as providing training. We’re also going to have an exhibitor hall, where people can find out about resources that are available to them in their areas.”
In a place where blind people are openly considered to be a burden, the idea behind Cambiando Vidas strikes at a deeper insight: you can have the best education in the world, but if your family doesn’t believe in your capability, you are at a great disadvantage. For this reason, it’s equally important to educate parents and relatives about what their blind children can achieve. “We can teach skills, we can teach you to use a cane,” she says, “but if we don’t teach them empowerment, it doesn’t mean much.”
For her Holman Prize project, Conchita plans to bring Cambiando Vidas to Guadalajara in July 2019. “The goal is that this will serve as the beginning of people coming together and advocating for themselves and advocating through the government as well,” she says. “We want better education for our children. In the short term, it’s just about them being able to find resources amongst each other so that what is possible for a blind person can shift, and so that the people who are begging can find something else.”
Cambiando Vidas is just a small piece of Conchita’s much greater ambition, but it’s a project where the Holman Prize will go a long way. On this, Conchita is clear: “I don’t think people should have to cross the border to access these services, but more importantly I don’t think that they should have to cross the border to lead a dignified life. Wherever you’re born you should have the same opportunities as everyone else.”
“The LightHouse believes that all blind people, whatever their nation of origin, should have access to modern thinking and tools to enable them to live in an accomplished manner,” says Bryan Bashin, CEO of the San Francisco-based organization. “Our struggles and accomplishments are the same in whatever country we live, and it gives the LightHouse great pleasure to help bring these options to blind people around the world.”
The LightHouse for the Blind and Visually Impaired, which is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization based in San Francisco, is actively seeking sponsorships and support for the 2019 Holman Prize, including donations of equipment for the winner’s projects. To offer your support, contact holman@lighthouse-sf.org. Individuals may donate any amount using LightHouse’s secure form. For sponsorship inquiries, email us or call (415) 694-7333.
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