S1E152 - 20240220 - Tuesday Topics - New Employment considerations.

This may be one of the most significant Tuesday Topics in our history. We will once more welcome guests from our ACB Employment Committee and will extend invitations to two other people who may or may not join us. I will tell you as this message proceeds who they are. Two components of our program will involve looking at data that the Employment Committee has put together from a recent survey. Second we will explore together what the role of the ACB Employment Committee ought to be and how we can forward their efforts at the state and national level.

At the ACB convention last July, we had a presentation concerning the "big data" project as it applied to people over the age of 65. It was clear that the data that was developed under the leadership of the Vision Serve Alliance under the aegis of extremely well-qualified statistical experts provided information about this population that painted a picture that was more detailed and nuanced than any data we have had at our disposal till now. That data which includes national information and state details allowed us to see just how precarious a condition many of our seniors who are blind or have low vision are in. That project represented phase one of the data collection process. Less than a month ago data became available for phase two which looked at some of the same issues for people who are blind or have low vision aged 18 to 64. The data that was collected came from surveys that were done in 2019 so as to avoid being influenced by COVID.

The state of Florida bought access to this data for the nation and for the sunshine state. We may look at the Florida data for the sake of comparison but our primary goal will be to explore the national findings of phase two which seriously contradict some of the commonly held beliefs about employment, education and health for this population.

We will send panelist invitations to Director Robert Doyle and to Lee Nasehi, Executive Director of the Vision Serve Alliance. Neither is required to be there but we wanted to be sure they both knew they were welcome to join us.

I believe that the data in this report sheds much new light on a population where we have tended to generalize about rather than measure using credible data. When we apply ourselves we discover much that we did not know and much that asks us to rethink many of the beliefs we have taken for granted.

Find out more at https://acb-tuesday-topics.pinecast.co