Canes, Trains, and Literacy - June 11-15
Though the week of June 11 was mostly filled with further grant research, a major highlight was NBP's Annual Meeting, which is a big event for board members and trustees. Read on for more details!
On Monday June 11, I was asked to quickly try to find a restaurant that would donate a meal for the team of kids who had walked in our Vision5K of a couple of weeks ago. It seems that they raised more money than we first thought, meaning that we need to find them a prize that we can present to them at the Annual Meeting tomorrow. The major problem was that most restaurants I called had already distributed their donations for the year, no matter how deserving we sounded. Other than that, I e-mailed Lina's reader profile to her for her review, and continued grant research.
On Tuesday, besides continued National Lincs grant research, I was asked to start putting together a proposal for Symantec Corporation. This task is not as hard as I had first thought, because we already have a bunch of templates with information about our company that we manipulate to fit each proposal. One of my supervisors will go over my work later, and I'll be interested to hear how I did. The best part of today, though, was the Annual Meeting, which took place at night. It's main purpose seems to be informational, and the people in attendance were mostly board members, trustees and donors. It was very cool to meet people who were so supportive of the Press, and who had been for ages, in many cases. I met a couple from Old Saybrook, CT, who are great friends of the Press' retiring president, Bill Raeder. They were excited that I live so close by, and so I may see them next year, which would be fun. Indeed, many of the speeches highlighted Bill's retirement, what he has done for the company, and how he will be missed. In his own speech, he talked about how well the Press has been doing, and how things look very positive, which was very exciting to hear. Most people's favorite, though, was the speech by Helen, a woman who has worked in the collating department at NBP for about 40 years. It was overall a very enjoyable night, with some very good snacks.
For the rest of the week, I worked more on grants, and read proposals that we have submitted in the past, which was actually fascinating, because I got to see how they differed - sometimes very subtlely. I also started researching new statistics on braille literacy, so we can have new information to put in proposals. Though it appears that there aren't any new ones, perhaps because there hasn't been another census since we got the old ones, I did find a few articles on the psychological and developmental importance of braille literacy, which should help. The week ended slowly, because I had no supervisors on Friday, and though I had work to do, it made me realize how little interruptions make the day go by a lot faster. The waffle breakfast that we had as a Friday morning event, though, was splendid. That was all for a busy week. And, as I have a bad headache, I shall stop and write more tomorrow. Thanks for reading!