ISIGHT provides balance for many

Kris Hill

Thursday, Nov. 23, 2000 | 9:51 a.m.

Linda Cooper's eyes are clouded from a five-year bout with glaucoma, but it's difficult to tell through the sunglasses she usually wears. Her sight is fading, but she is not yet completely blind.

After living with a sighted family for five months, she got her own apartment in October. It was a big first step toward independence for Cooper, as well as a relief. Sighted people never put things back in the same place twice, she said.

"Normal people don't understand," Cooper said. "They just can't."

It's those seemingly small things that only other visually impaired people understand that keep her going back to the ISIGHT Center for the Blind. The people at the center are like family, Cooper said.

"We're all in the same boat."

Cooper recently moved back to Las Vegas after living in a Seattle suburb the past six years. She ended up back here, she said, because it's home. And unlike other places she's lived, there is a balance to ISIGHT that doesn't exist at other centers for the blind.

The balance of providing social activity and employment is what makes ISIGHT special. Other centers, such as the one in Seattle, offered only employment-related services, Cooper said.

ISIGHT, which until May was known as the Las Vegas Blind Center, is changing to try to draw more clients like Cooper. Under its previous president, John Tate, the center didn't make much of an effort to reach out to the more than 15,000 blind people in the Las Vegas area, Ronnie Wilson, ISIGHT's current president, said.

The center has been in Las Vegas since 1955, Wilson said, and it's frustrating that so few people know of it.

The change began four years ago, when Katherine Law, a former volunteer, became the new director. Wilson, also a former volunteer, joined the board shortly before it was newly formed in May and recently became president of the nonprofit.

After the new board was formed, the center rewrote its bylaws and has been making an effort to reach out to visually impaired Las Vegans.

One outreach tool ISIGHT added was transportation. Every morning about 5:30 the center's two buses go out and pick up any clients who live within a 5-mile radius. About 1 p.m. the buses take them home. The center serves about 100 clients each month.

Part of the outreach is beyond Las Vegas. Wilson hopes the center will earn an affiliation with the New York-based Helen Keller National Center by early next year. Through that organization, which is funded by federal money, ISIGHT can apply for a grant that will pay for an employment counselor over a five-year period.

In addition to access to grant money, ISIGHT will also be able to use various different educational programs and materials developed by the Helen Keller National Center and participate in any special projects the national organization develops in the future.

With the benefits of an affiliation with the national center, ISIGHT will be able to better serve its clients, Wilson said.

The added resources may also allow the center to better reach out to many potential clients who don't come because of fear, Wilson said.

Cooper started going to the center six months ago to learn braille, she said, but a lot of visually impaired people are afraid to go out in the world.

It's a stigma, Cooper said. "You have to get out of yourself to reach out your hand for help."

The center offers more than just braille classes. Clients can socialize, make crafts, manufacture mops, learn how to use computers with talking software and a variety of other activities.

For the mop project, the center uses a variety of equipment that has been adapted for the visually impaired to build mops that ISIGHT then sells to the federal government.

Wilson hopes to expand the center and its services in many other ways. The center has two buildings. One structure houses the mop project. It is also home to the ceramics area, where clients can create, paint and fire ceramics in kilns. It is also home to the eyeglass shop. ISIGHT accepts donated glasses, which are given to the needy.

The plan for that building is to tear it down and construct a building better suited to the manufacture of the mops.

Improvements are planned for the main building, which is larger and where most of the social activities take place. It has a two-lane bowling alley that is in the process of being remodeled and a dance hall on the second floor that serves as a storage area.

Once the new building is constructed, the dance hall will be converted back to an activity area for the center. The main building will then have 16,000 square feet of space for social events.

Wilson hopes that when ISIGHT can start offering more social activities, that will draw visually impaired youth to the center.

The changes so far have brought an improvement that Helen Thome, another client, is happy to see. "We're beginning to have something that we can be proud of," she said.

Thome, a former advertising manager for now-defunct Grant's department store, has been an ISIGHT client since 1989 and has done everything the center has to offer. The 82-year-old has not lost her eyesight entirely.

She has lost enough, though, that she can no longer drive, as has Cooper. That's the one thing they both miss most, driving, because that was their freedom.

Cooper does have a seeing-eye dog, a big black Labrador named Sam, who helps her get around. Being able to get around is important, because she wants to go back to school. Cooper thinks she may be able to enroll at the Community College of Southern Nevada in the spring. Eventually she would like to transfer to UNLV and earn a degree in education.

"I'd like to help out special needs kids," she said.