What Changes When A Community Treats Blindness Like A Solvable Problem

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This is the Good Neighbor Podcast, the place where local businesses and neighbors come together.
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Here's your host, Garfield Bowen.
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Welcome to the Good Neighbor Podcast.
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Today I have for you Joan Friedman with the Lighthouse for Blind of Palm Beaches, Treasure Coast, and Okeechobee.
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How are you doing today?
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I'm doing excellent.
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How about yourself?
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I'm doing fantastic.
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Listen, we're excited to learn to learn all about you and your organization.
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Tell us about it.
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Absolutely.
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So Lighthouse for the Blind of the Palm Beaches, Treasure Coast in Okeechobee, is celebrating 80 years of serving those who are blind and visually impaired in this part of Florida.
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We have been doing this since 1946, and we're excited because we have a big celebration for our 80th anniversary coming up in December.
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But what we do is we work with people who are emerging on blindness, babies who were born with no vision at all, and those who might have eye impairments and injuries.
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And we have tools and technology and the best educators to really give the proper education to know how to live a full life, even with a disability of blindness or vision impairment.
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So we have been uh we were built actually in 1946 as part of the Lions Club, and they were the ones that kind of set the model of example of how we're going to serve this community as a nonprofit.
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And then we were able to create a lot of opportunities for people that wanted to go into this vocation and to have educators with the right credentialing to work with those who are blind, visually impaired, whether they be babies, children, teenagers, young adults, middle-aged adults, and seniors who are emerging through just other eye impairments.
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So we work from birth to end of life.
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And what we are excited about doing is just making the lives of those who are facing this more comfortable and knowing that life can be pretty much normal, depending upon how much you're willing to learn.
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And with the new technologies that are coming into play, it is making it a lot of a lot more normalization that people don't even sometimes know that people are visually impaired or blind.
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So, and we can get into that later if you would like.
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But we're just excited to be celebrating this um 80th anniversary year.
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We're doing it on December 3rd at the Pelican Club in Jupiter.
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We hope to have many of our past clients and people, families, and because we don't just educate maybe a child or a baby.
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We educate the parents, we educate the caregivers so that their lives can have the full ability to do what they're able to do.
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So we are just excited to be celebrating this.
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There's been a lot of accomplishments in history over the years, and um I'm happy to share the save the date for our big event.
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And um uh I'm always looking for sponsorships and partnerships, and we're just very excited to share about what we do um throughout Southeast Florida.
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Now I know um Ray Charles, I was watching a movie recently, and how he went to school in Jacksonville and how he's able to navigate the landscape.
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Um how how did you get into this business?
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You know, it really just kind of fell upon me.
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I was working at Boys and Girls Clubs of St.
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Lucie County.
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I was there for about six years.
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I was the development director.
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And basically throughout my career, I have always been youth-oriented.
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I decided I was going to retire.
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And I didn't plan that out very well.
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So I said, but I have all these relationships and I know all of these amazing people that, you know, I have in my in my community engagements of the things that I've done.
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And I wasn't ready just to, you know, play pickleball all day or something like that.
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So um I reached out to some people and said, you know what, I would think about working part-time and I want to be in a different vocation.
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I want to work with something that I have never done before.
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I wouldn't mind working, you know, with people with disabilities because I haven't done it.
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I said veterans, whatever, you know, might come up.
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I would love to have the opportunity to just expand my horizons of how I work in the nonprofit world.
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So it didn't take too long, maybe a couple hours.
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And I got a phone call from uh Lisa Stella, who's the executive director of Lighthouse for the Blind, who was looking for somebody that had a good relationship pool in St.
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Lucie County because we were expanding services in greater capacity that way.
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So we met and I was excited to work with her, and she was excited to work with me, and we are now celebrating two years together.
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My 15-hour a week job has now turned into about a 50-hour a week job, and that's okay because it's not a job, it is something that I wake up and I love doing every single day, and it is an honor to be part of this organization, and it's an honor to work with the most amazing, grateful clients that it is it just brings me such joy, and I am just so happy that I can be a conduit of helping in any way that I can because it is just something that throughout my years of experience I've never seen something like this, and I'm just so grateful to be part of it during this time where there's a lot of technology that really helps create a very high-quality life for those who are blind or visually impaired.
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I know you mentioned um earlier that you know all this great work requires uh donor support.
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How do you currently uh attract your donors?
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How I attract the donors really is by storytelling.
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I have a um a lot of information where I've seen such positive outcomes from what we have done for our clients.
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People who really thought that their lives were going to be very um different because of their emerging um vision impairments or vision losses.
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They really thought that, okay, I can't drive anymore, I can't, you know, play cards anymore, I can't do this anymore or that anymore.
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You know, it it they just were so depressed over the fact that you know life was going to change for them so rapidly because of the vision loss.
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And when our educators um come to talk to these individuals as we're setting them up for services, we have such a plethora of ways that we help individuals.
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So let's start off with babies, babies that are born with no sight at all, or very little, or vision impairment.
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We are notified um by either a a nurse from like a another nonprofit, like helping people succeed, or they're given our number to, you know, to help with babies, and we actually go in the home of the parents and the um, you know, who's ever working with the baby, and just kind to work with them and show them, you know, how to really have this baby grow up to be just everything that they could possibly be, and nothing's gonna stop them.
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And I'm gonna give you an example of one baby that we had from the very beginning of life, and her name was Lauren, and Lauren is about 28 now, and we worked with her basically with her parents from the time she was born.
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Well, at my last luncheon at Palm Beach, Lauren is now a state district attorney, completely blind, and is doing that to support women and children and the in Palm Beach County.
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And she was our keynote speaker, and through the services that she has received, she is so independent.
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She does have a guide dog, um, but she is just able to do so much, and that again is with the educational opportunities that we offered throughout her life.
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We went to school with her and showed her how to do her work and how she can do that.
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She went to college on her own and then came back and passed the bar for her law degree.
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So it is amazing.
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There's no stopping individuals.
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Um, she never had real sight, so she is a braille reader.
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And actually, when she did her keynote presentation at our luncheon this past um March of 2026, it was all in Braille.
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And she is such an accomplished individual, and that's only one story that you know is amazing.
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We have so many stories, but let me share with you some of the things that we do.
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We have before you before you get into that.
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I just want to really say, wow, that's that that's really big.
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And um today you're on my show, but have you ever thought about doing your own podcast?
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People have brought it up to me.
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I'm not gonna say that I'm I just I'm all about serving.
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Um and while the podcasts are very valuable and I love doing them, I'm not sure because I just want to serve people.
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I love the community I'm in.
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I grew up in New York City in Bayside, Queens, and I'm telling you, three-quarters of my high school is out here now in Florida.
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And it's so nice to be back in an where, you know, being from New York and having that New York accent and you know, maybe being a little bit more assertive of an individual.
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And I'm so glad that I had that upbringing, but it also gave me the opportunity to channel those personality traits that I developed as a young child in a very big city and utilize it for the best way possible to help others.
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And while podcasts sound great, um I'm not sure that I don't want it to take me away from what I love doing.
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And this is what I love doing.
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I love supporting and helping others.
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I love watching people rise above where they never thought that they can go.
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And I just love being part of that journey with them.
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Well, Joanne, we're about out of time, but I want you to leave our listeners with one thing.
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Yes.
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One thing they should remember about the lighthouse for line off the palm beaches, treasure coast, and okechobe.
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What's that one thing you want them to remember from this?
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Okay, the one thing I want everybody to know we are celebrating our 80th anniversary.
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Please visit our website at Lighthouse for the Blind to the Palm Beaches.
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You will find out about all the things that we do.
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And it's um Lighthouse PB, it's lhpb.org.
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And I encourage you to go visit and find out all about us.
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And I think that you're going to be delightfully, pleasantly surprised about how many things we do to support so many in our community.
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And it's our honor and our privilege to do it.
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With those that just like pushing buttons on a phone, is there a number you like to share?
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Sure, they can call me on my cell phone.
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I pick up my phones, just so everybody knows.
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And it is 402, is my area code, and it's 740-8260.
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Do not hesitate to call me because I'll tell you anything you want to know about the lighthouse because I love talking about it.
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Well, join, it's been a pleasure having you on your show.
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I wish you and your organization the very best moving forward.
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Thank you.
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Thank you for listening to the Good Neighbor Podcast.
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To nominate your favorite local businesses to be featured on the show, go to gnpttreasurecoast.com.
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