Minds Eye had reason to celebrate the month of September. Our founder, Fr. Boni Wittenbrink, OMI, was given the Agrama Harmony Gold and Light Lifetime Achievement Award from Retinitis Pigmentosa International, and one of our long time volunteers, Lorraine Sugent, was given the President’s Call to Service Award for completing over 4000 documented hours of volunteering. These awards highlighted what one person can do to change the world.

“I don’t know anything about radios except how to turn one on, and I sure don’t know anything about blind people except that they can’t see. But if you think I can help, I’ll do it,” Fr. Boni famously told his superiors when he was tasked with starting a reading service for the blind back in the 1970’s. That task sparked a lifelong commitment to people with vision loss. After building what’s now Minds Eye from nothing, he began mentoring others who wanted to start reading services in their own cities and is credited with lending a hand in all of the other reading services in Illinois, as well as the service in Washington D.C. and many others. He started Illinois Radio Reading Services, Inc., an organization of the eleven the Illinois reading services and gathered the leaders throughout the nation and help launch what is now the International Association of Audio Information Services, which pulls together over 100 reading services throughout the world. In his travels, he lent his support to the American Foundation of the Blind and Retinitis Pigmentosa International (RPI), an organization that works to find a cure for retinitis pigmentosa, a disease that damages the retina and eventually blinds its victims. Because of his many years of support for RPI and people with vision loss, he was awarded this achievement.

Lorraine started volunteering with Minds Eye in 1983. By our count, she’s put in over 2500 hours of service at Minds Eye since then. In those many hours, she’s done just about every volunteer job at Minds Eye. She started out as a clerical volunteer, entering donations into the ledger and helping keep track of the office. After about a year, she began reading the In the Kitchen recipe show. Over the year’s she’s pitched in to make sure fundraising events went off seamlessly, and these days you can find her here each Wednesday morning, producing the morning newspaper and mailing the radios to listeners. Lorraine also spends time volunteering at Cahokia Mounds and Faith in Action. Without her, our community would be a lot different.

If you ever have the chance to meet Fr. Boni or Lorraine, you’ll realize that they are both ordinary people who have put extraordinary effort into making changes in their part of world. They did the heavy lifting, the dirty work, and put in the effort to make Minds Eye and the other causes dear to them great. Over 200 volunteers at Minds Eye follow their lead and contribute thousands of hours to produce and distribute 102 hours of new programming every week to 12,000 listeners. While the past year was financially very difficult as Minds Eye experienced major funding cuts from our biggest supporters, due largely to their own funding woes, those everyday people banded together to do the most important thing: keep Minds Eye alive and producing readings of newspapers, magazines, and books for all those who need it now and for those who will need it in the future. Funding will continue to be difficult for the foreseeable future, but there’s hope. There are thousands of people out there like Fr. Boni and Lorraine who are willing to give a gift or give their time so that their friends and neighbors have access to the most current and in depth news. You may not know it, but you’re one of those people too. Thank you for your efforts in helping people who are blind hear all the news that the rest of us get to take for granted.

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