We listened to three keynote speakers this morning: Marsha de Cordova MP (Labour MP for Battersea), Sam Latif (Company Accessibility Leader, Proctor & Gamble) and Louisa Wickham (National Clinical Director for Eye Care, Moorfields Eye Hospital).
Elin Williams from LOOK reports:
Fiona Sandford, CEO of Visionary UK’s tagline was “Fear is contagious, but so is bravery”. This speaks to how our LOOK Mentors are really brave sharing with their mentees, and our mentees are really brave in sharing with their LOOK Mentors.
Marsha and Sam are epic, so inspiring! We need them to come and speak to our Mentors [Editors note: Marsha and Sam – if you’re reading this, we’d love to hear from you!].
Sam used the analogy of running a race and that we come across hurdles on the way and we can jump over them, go around or under them … but sometimes we need to be brave and just smash through them! This is what our Mentors and mentees are doing.
Fiona from Visionary UK also said we need to be brave in leading the change and standing with VI people as a sector and be allies and we do that. We do this awesomely at LOOK with our VI staff. They asked if there are any visually impaired CEOs – and we could proudly say, yes, our CEO at LOOK is VI!
Photo of Elin Williams (right) with LOOK Mentor Nathan at the Annual Awards at Visionary Conference 2023.
About LOOK
LOOK supports visually impaired children, young people and their families to thrive. Our small but mighty charity believes in peer support. Many of our staff are visually impaired and / or are parents to visually impaired children. Our flagship Mentor Project is led by a team of staff all of whom are blind or visually impaired themselves.
We train and support volunteer Mentors to share their lived experiences and life hacks with younger VI mentees through a safe and structured programme. We support families through our fortnightly Parent Support Group led by two staff members who are parents to VI teenagers, and through family events.
Watch our CEO, Charlotte Carson, introduce LOOK: www.look-uk.org/introvideo
