Skip to main content

AER

Events
Courses
Product Bundles
My Cart
Search
Sign In

Item Added to Cart

You just added

You have item(s) in your cart

  • Proceed to Checkout
  1. Courses
  2. Mississippi AER 2022 Virtua...
  3. Thursday, October 27 Mornin...
  4. Opening Session: Keynote Sp...

    Opening Session: Keynote Speaker: When All Things Are Equal, Blindness is the Competitive Edge

    • Overview

    Thank you

    This live web event has ended. Thank you for attending.

    Description

    Imagine if the world saw blindness as a competitive edge in school and employment. In this session you'll learn how changing the world's current bias against blindness starts with you. Kristin Smedley will share how her blind sons beat the negative bias and created the lives of their dreams ‐ and how their success without sight is repeatable.

    Learning Objectives: At the end of this session, participants will:
    1. See how the skills of succeeding without sight enable a person that is blind/VI to have an advantage over sighted colleagues/peers.
    2. Understand the reasons the bias against blindness is causing the $31.7 Billion impact on the US economy.
    3. Have a new perspective of how the IEP and Reasonable Accommodation are crucial to succeeding without sight.
    4. Hear real stories of real application of blindness as a competitive edge.

    This session was presented on October 27, 2022 by Kristin Smedley

    Contributors

    • Kristin Smedley

      Kristin Smedley’s mantra is “Life is funny... sort of.” Her fun‐loving spirit and energetic personality guided her life in the direction of a career in teaching. However, when her two sons were born blind, Kristin walked away from the classroom to teach her sons how to navigate a world they could not see. Knowing that Michael and Mitchell needed their mother to fight for them, Kristin began advocating for the tools her blind children needed.

      In 2011, Kristin launched a nonprofit to fund research and resources for children living with the rare eye disease her sons have, CRB1 LCA/RP. In just nine years, the Curing Retinal Blindness Foundation has raised over 1.4 million dollars and achieved a National Rare Eye Disease Awareness Day. In 2019, Kristin published her first book called Thriving Blind: Stories of Real People Succeeding Without Sight. It achieved #1 New Release on Amazon for paperback and kindle. Kristin partnered with TMobile and the National Braille Press to make the book available in Braille. She used that book to catapult an engaged and supportive online community called Thriving Blind Academy which connects families living with blindness to each other and to mentors and resources for succeeding without sight.

      Kristin lives in suburban Philadelphia with her three children and two rescue dogs.

    October 27, 2022
    Thu 8:00 AM CDT

    Duration 2H 0M

    This live web event has ended.

    Support Contact
    tiffany@aerbvi.org
    (703) 671-5873
    Load more posts
    Register
    Log In
    Forgot password?

    You finished this item!

    • Go back to section
    • Go to next item
    • Events
    • Courses
    • Search
    • Support
    • My Cart
    • Sign In
    • Privacy Policy | Cookies Policy