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The New Hampshire Association for the Blind doesnt want to limit its mission because of its name.

As a result, this week the 105-year-old organization announced that it is changing its name to Future in Sight, which the group says better reflects its goal and overall duties within the state.

In an interview with New Hampshire Public Radio, Future in Sight President and CEO David Morgan noted that 93 percent of the people the organization serves have some form of sight loss but arent blind.

From the interview:

Up until recently, we never served babies. We served seniors, but not outside their home. And more and more, were discovering there are some 30,000 New Hampshire residents with profound sight loss, and we only served about 1,100 last year. So theres certainly a compelling need out there thats left unfulfilled. And frankly, the word blind in our name inhibited a lot of conversations, particularly in doctors offices and between doctors and their patients.

The latter situation proved a significant problem for the organization, according to Morgan, who told the Concord Monitor that the group had expanded its mission in recent years, partly because of changes with the states offerings. As a result, the association has received more referrals from doctors.

But these referrals created problems because members of the public were thrown off by the name.

The new name already has had an important impact on these conversations, Morgan stated.

As we stopped using the word blind, what we did was create new conversation around the word sight and the use of whats left for residual sight for both school-age kids and adults, he explained in his New Hampshire Public Radio interview.

In a blog post, Morgan added that the group is also expanding its mission to bordering states around New Hampshire.

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Association's Name Change Focuses on Sight, Not Blindness - Associations Now

This entry was posted on March 3, 2017 at 2:45 am and is filed under Blindness. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed. |