Submitted to the LightHouse Board of Directors June 2026. Prepared by Laura Millar, MPH, M.A. Blind public health professional, sociologist, and disability justice advocate; former LightHouse staff member, volunteer, and longtime community participant.
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Table of Contents
- Strategic recommendations in brief
- Executive Summary
- Why This Report Exists
- The Central Argument: LightHouse Is Community Health Infrastructure
- Health Promotion and the Social Model
- Strategic Plan Alignment and Why This Moment Matters
- Strategic Recommendations for Stewardship, Health Promotion, and Community Resilience
- Domain I. Develop Personal and Leadership Skills
- Domain II. Create Supportive Environments
- Domain III. Strengthen Community Action
- Domain IV. Build Healthier Policies and Practices
- Domain V. Reorient Systems Through Partnership and Innovation
- Measuring What Matters
- What Becomes Possible
- Appendix A: Public Health and Health Promotion Language for Board Use
- Appendix B: Large Grant and Partnership Pathways to Explore
- Domain I. Develop Personal and Leadership Skills
- Domain II. Create Supportive Environments
- Domain III. Strengthen Community Action
- Domain IV. Build Healthier Policies and Practices
- Domain V. Reorient Systems Through Partnership and Innovation
- What Becomes Possible
- Appendix C: Final Reflection and Acknowledgments
Executive Summary
LightHouse for the Blind and Visually Impaired occupies a rare position in the Bay Area and in the larger blindness field. It is a blindness organization, a community institution, a cultural space, a training center, a gathering place, a leadership pipeline, an access resource, and a trusted point of connection for many blind, low vision, and DeafBlind people. (Throughout this report, DeafBlind refers to people with combined hearing and vision loss, whose communication, language, and access needs are distinct from those of people who are blind or Deaf alone.)
This report offers a public health, sociological, and disability justice framework for understanding LightHouse as community health infrastructure: the people, places, relationships, programs, and institutions that help a community stay connected, resilient, and able to participate in life. The phrase is intentional, as LightHouse does not only provide services. At its best, LightHouse helps create the conditions in which blind people connect, belong, build skills, develop leadership, challenge ableism, and thrive.
This is not a medical model report, as blindness is not the health problem. This report is grounded in the social model of disability, which locates barriers not in blind bodies but in environments, systems, policies, and attitudes that affect them. Ableism, isolation, exclusion, inaccessible systems, low expectations, and loss of community are the conditions that harm health and wellbeing, and the social model is the tool for identifying and challenging them.
Health promotion, as the term is used throughout this report, means the work of enabling people and communities to increase control over the conditions that shape individual and community health. It includes developing personal and leadership skills, creating supportive environments, strengthening community action, building healthier policies and practices, and reorienting systems toward participation, autonomy, access, and wellbeing. LightHouse is already doing much of this work, even if it has not always used public health language to describe it. (A glossary of the public health terms used in this report appears in Appendix A.)
The core concern of the challenges LightHouse is facing is not the loss of any single service. Services matter and should be protected, improved, and evaluated, but the deeper risk is the erosion of community. Programs can sometimes be rebuilt, but a community’s social model heartbeat, once weakened, is much harder to recover.
This report asks the Board and leadership to consider not only what LightHouse does, but what LightHouse makes possible. The recommendations are written as stewardship frameworks, not directives. They are intended to support Board reflection, executive leadership, strategic planning, community listening, grant development, and future partnerships.
Strategic recommendations in brief
The recommendations are organized under the five established domains of health promotion practice. Each domain names ways in which LightHouse already promotes health and points to where that work can be strengthened. Appendix B maps large grant and partnership pathways that align with these same domains.
Develop personal and leadership skills. Treat belonging, blind pride, mentorship, role models, leadership of those most impacted, and benefits-aware pathways to paid participation as core outcomes that move people from isolation to participation and contribution.
Create supportive environments. Strengthen consent-centered governance, workforce stability, psychological safety, relationship continuity, and the physical and cultural spaces that hold community, so the institution itself supports belonging and trust.
Strengthen community action. Use distributive leadership and blind-led innovation to support community members as co-creators, leaders, mentors, and problem-solvers rather than only recipients of services.
Build healthier policies and practices. Connect the strategic plan’s ableism and disability justice language to the conditions that shape health, including transportation, healthcare access, employment, digital accessibility, information access, education, housing, community living, and autonomy, both in LightHouse’s external advocacy and in its own internal practices.
Reorient systems through partnership and innovation. Bring LightHouse’s expertise in blindness, access, and anti-ableism into partnerships with health systems, public health departments, universities, workforce agencies, and disability organizations, opening new research, funding, and systems-change pathways.
The report ends with one central question: what becomes possible when LightHouse fully recognizes itself as community health infrastructure and strengthens the social model as health promotion in action?
Why This Report Exists
This report is built and sourced from years of participation, employment, volunteerism, advocacy, and listening. Its purpose is not to tell the Board how to do its job – it is to offer language for understanding the health promotion work LightHouse is already doing, and to identify practical ways to protect, strengthen, and build on that work. It is an invitation to stewardship.
I still remember people walking down Market Street singing “Blind and Proud” on opening day at 1155 Market. At the time, I was bringing my voice but I was not yet there in my heart. Today, I understand exactly what those words meant. That shift is not only a personal story; it is evidence of what blind-positive community can do. A person can enter a space believing blindness is the problem and, through community, mentorship, skills, and culture, come to understand that ableism is the issue.
The foundation I built at LightHouse allowed me to bring lessons about blindness, ableism, accessibility, autonomy, inclusion, blind pride, and community into national public health, policy, advocacy, and blindness spaces. This report brings some of those public health and health promotion frameworks back to LightHouse while remaining grounded in the organization’s own social model tradition.
LightHouse must navigate funding, governance, workforce stability, leadership transition, service demands, community expectations, and external pressures on disability rights and access. The recommendations in this report are therefore framed as strategic considerations: ways to protect what is precious, strengthen what is already working, and explore what could become possible. They are also stewardship opportunities that may open new resources and partnerships while keeping LightHouse’s community identity at the center.
This report was compiled and edited with the assistance of artificial intelligence tools. Its analysis, perspective, and recommendations are the work of Laura Millar, and are grounded in years of participation, observation, employment, volunteerism, advocacy, and lived experience within the LightHouse community and the broader blindness and public health fields.
The Central Argument: LightHouse Is Community Health Infrastructure
A service provider delivers programs. A community health institution changes the conditions under which people live, relate, participate, and imagine their futures. LightHouse does both.
When a blind person comes to LightHouse, the official services may include orientation and mobility, technology training, employment support, DeafBlind services, youth programming, camp, accessible media, art, recreation, advocacy, or community education. The deeper outcomes may include confidence, connection, blind pride, self-advocacy, autonomy, mentorship, leadership, trust, and belonging.
Those outcomes are not secondary – they are health-promoting conditions, which are the primary purpose of what LightHouse brings to the community. Public health names them social determinants of health: the social, economic, community, and environmental conditions that shape whether people can be healthy and thrive. For blind people, those conditions include transportation, access to information, healthcare access, employment, education, housing, communication, social connection, safety, autonomy, and freedom from ableism.
LightHouse is community health infrastructure because it helps create and sustain those conditions. The central stewardship question is whether LightHouse can protect and strengthen the community infrastructure that helps blind people become connected, confident, capable, proud, and involved in shaping the world around them.
Health Promotion and the Social Model
When this report uses public health language, it is not returning to a medical model of blindness. Rather, it frames ableism, isolation, exclusion, inaccessible systems, low expectations, loss of autonomy, and loss of community as conditions that affect health. In that sense, the social model is public health in action: when LightHouse helps people learn skills, build confidence, find mentors, challenge internalized ableism, develop leadership, and participate in community, it is improving the conditions for health and wellbeing. (Internalized ableism refers to the way disabled people can absorb society’s low expectations and negative beliefs about disability and turn them inward.)
This report is also grounded in disability justice, a framework developed by disabled activists of color that goes beyond disability rights. Where disability rights focuses on legal protections and equal access, disability justice asks deeper questions about whose leadership is centered, how ableism intersects with racism and other systems of oppression, and whether communities themselves hold power, not just legal claims.
Using health promotion language does not turn LightHouse into a public health agency or a medical institution. The point is simpler: LightHouse is already doing health promotion work. Naming it gives the Board, leadership, funders, partners, and community members stronger language for understanding and strengthening the organization.
Strategic Plan Alignment and Why This Moment Matters
LightHouse’s strategic plan already gives the organization important language: ableism, disability justice, blind-positive culture, accessibility, community, reach to diverse communities, DeafBlind services, staff culture, leadership, and organizational sustainability. This report does not import those values from the outside – it connects them to public health and health promotion.
Current conditions make that lens timely. Blind Californians are navigating advocacy around transportation, healthcare access, digital accessibility, rehabilitation services, employment, education, housing, community living, and civil rights. These are not isolated policy topics; they are social determinants of health because they shape daily life, autonomy, safety, participation, and belonging.
The California Disability Leadership Day of Action and related advocacy efforts show this clearly. When blind and disabled people advocate for transportation, accessible information, rehabilitation services, employment access, healthcare access, community living, and public participation, they are also advocating for health-promoting conditions.
This is the larger opportunity: LightHouse can become a national leader in explaining and demonstrating how blindness organizations contribute to health, not by treating blindness as illness, but by challenging ableism and strengthening the conditions that help blind people thrive.
Strategic Recommendations for Stewardship, Health Promotion, and Community Resilience
The following recommendations – written in June 2026 – are not a governance manual, they are stewardship frameworks. Each asks what should be protected, what could be strengthened, and what becomes possible if LightHouse more fully recognizes itself as community health infrastructure.
The recommendations are organized under the five domains of health promotion practice and while they are identified by number as well as name, they are frameworks to draw on, not a ranked checklist. Some recommendations contribute to more than one domain; where that happens, the connection is noted rather than repeated.
Domain I. Develop Personal and Leadership Skills
This domain concerns building confidence, autonomy, self-advocacy, blind pride, mentorship, and leadership in individuals and across the community. Three recommendations live here.
Belonging, Blind-Positive Identity, Blindness Culture, Mentorship, and Leadership
Core idea. LightHouse should treat belonging, blind-positive identity development, blind pride, blindness culture, mentorship, role models, and leadership development as core organizational outcomes. These are not side effects of service delivery; they are key outcomes of what LightHouse produces.
Why it matters. Many blind people arrive carrying internalized ableism, isolation, low expectations, or limited exposure to blind adults living full lives. This is especially true for seniors and people with acquired vision loss, who often arrive grieving, resistant to blindness identity, and surrounded by messages that vision loss means the end of independence. Identity development for that population looks different: it may begin with grief support and practical skills before blind pride becomes imaginable. When people find community, they begin to see themselves differently. That shift can lead to confidence, participation, self-advocacy, and leadership. This is health promotion through identity, connection, and community action.
Stewardship opportunities. LightHouse can continue preserving, strengthening, and growing blindness culture through intergenerational mentorship, blind role models, blind-positive traditions, leadership pathways, peer support, and opportunities for participants to become volunteers, mentors, teachers, organizers, staff, consultants, board members, or community leaders. Blind mentors and role models are community assets whose lived expertise should be recognized as valuable, not treated as endlessly available without support.
What becomes possible. More blind people can arrive isolated and leave connected. More can move from internalized ableism toward blind pride. More can see themselves as mentors, advocates, professionals, parents, partners, artists, workers, teachers, and leaders. LightHouse becomes not only a place where blindness skills are taught, but a place where blindness culture is preserved, grown, and passed forward.
Leadership of Those Most Impacted, DeafBlind Leadership, and Language Justice
Core idea. LightHouse should treat leadership of those most impacted as a core disability justice and health promotion principle. This includes blind and DeafBlind leadership, multilingual leadership, leadership by people with multiple disabilities, and leadership by those who experience barriers most directly. This is a path toward distributive leadership, and it is not a proposal to transfer Board authority – it is about who helps shape decisions before they are finalized.
Why it matters. Inclusion is not the same as leadership. The people most affected by barriers often carry the most important knowledge about how those barriers work and what solutions are realistic. If DeafBlind people, multilingual community members, and historically underrepresented blind people are only invited to give feedback after decisions are designed, the organization loses expertise that should have shaped the process from the beginning.
Stewardship opportunities. LightHouse can explore leadership pathways, decision-making roles, mentorship, compensation, staff and board pipelines, interpretation and language access planning, DeafBlind-led evaluation, and community structures that place those most impacted in positions of influence. Leadership of those most impacted requires more than access to services. It requires power, role clarity, resources, and sustained support. Because access and language justice are also policy commitments, this recommendation connects to Domain IV.
Benefits-Aware Participation, Contribution, and Economic Pathways
Core idea. LightHouse should explore multiple pathways for contribution that recognize the realities of disability benefits, fluctuating health, caregiving responsibilities, transportation barriers, part-time capacity, and economic risk. A central concept here is Substantial Gainful Activity (SGA): the earnings threshold set by the Social Security Administration above which a person can lose disability benefits. For many blind and disabled people, the fear of crossing that threshold makes traditional employment feel dangerous, so participation should not be an all-or-nothing choice between full-time employment and unpaid volunteering.
Why it matters. Many blind and disabled people have valuable skills, lived experience, teaching capacity, cultural knowledge, access expertise, and leadership ability. Traditional employment models do not always create safe or realistic pathways for those talents to be used. When the only options are full-time work or unpaid contribution, many people are left out, and the community loses their expertise.
Stewardship opportunities. LightHouse can explore SGA-aware project roles, stipends, honoraria, consulting, peer mentorship positions, paid advisory roles, and short-term teaching opportunities, along with transparent pathways from small projects to larger roles. Because earned income can interact with SSI, SSDI, Medicaid, and other benefits in ways that carry real financial risk, these pathways should be designed together with benefits counseling, not as an afterthought. Connecting people to qualified benefits counseling, and structuring roles with that guidance in mind, protects participants and makes the pathways trustworthy. These roles should not replace stable jobs. They should widen the ways people can belong, contribute, earn, and lead. This recommendation also helps create supportive environments (Domain II).
Relevant funding and partnership lanes for mentorship, Blind Pride, leadership, and benefits-aware participation are outlined in Appendix B.
Domain II. Create Supportive Environments
This domain concerns making spaces, programs, governance practices, workplaces, and the institution itself supportive of belonging, trust, and participation. Physical places matter here too. Enchanted Hills Camp is one of the clearest examples of a supportive environment in the LightHouse community: a blindness-centered place where youth, families, and adults build skills, confidence, relationships, and belonging, and a site whose role in community resilience is explored further in Appendix B.
Supportive environments can also be lost. When a community institution undergoes major structural change without adequate community process, the consequences are not only organizational. People can lose familiar spaces, trusted staff, cultural identity, continuity of relationships, and the sense that the institution belongs to them. Those losses are health consequences, because belonging, trust, and continuity are health-promoting conditions. Any major institutional decision should therefore be evaluated not only for financial and operational impact, but for its impact on the community’s supportive environment. Two recommendations anchor this domain.
Consent-Centered Governance, Community Listening, and Institutional Trust
Core idea. LightHouse should view consent-centered governance as a framework for trust, transparency, and meaningful participation. It is not only about who has legal authority. It is about whether people have the information, time, access, and opportunity to understand and respond to decisions that affect them.
Why it matters. Community trust is a health asset. People are more likely to remain engaged, even during difficult decisions, when they understand how decisions are made and believe their perspectives were considered. Short public comment periods are not enough to sustain deep trust in a community institution. Health promotion depends on participation, shared learning, and communication.
Stewardship opportunities. LightHouse can strengthen consent-centered governance through adequate notice before meetings, timely distribution of information, plain-language explanations, transparency about constraints and tradeoffs, structured listening sessions, community conversations, feedback loops, and summaries that explain what was heard and what changed. This does not mean every decision is made by consensus. It means people are not left reacting to decisions without context. Done consistently, this lets the community experience governance as relationship rather than distance, and lets LightHouse model the consent culture it asks the broader world to practice with blind people.
Institutional Health, Workforce Stability, and Community Trust
Core idea. LightHouse should treat institutional health, workforce stability, psychological safety, and relationship continuity as part of community health. Staff wellbeing is not only an internal human resources issue. In a community institution, it affects trust, continuity, institutional memory, and the lived experience of participants.
Why it matters. Community members often experience organizational instability through the loss of trusted staff, turnover, communication gaps, program disruption, and erosion of institutional memory. Staff, volunteers, mentors, and long-term community leaders often serve as bridges between the organization and the community. When those bridges disappear abruptly, community trust can be affected.
Stewardship opportunities. LightHouse can continue strengthening workforce stability through transparent communication, knowledge transfer, succession planning, relationship-centered offboarding, alumni connections, pathways for returning where possible, leadership development, and support for psychological safety. Trust takes years to build and can be lost quickly, so it deserves intentional stewardship. The result is an organization that is more resilient during change, with institutional memory preserved and the relationships that hold community together treated as strategic assets.
Appendix B identifies resilience and emergency preparedness pathways that could help resource Enchanted Hills and other supportive-environment work.
Domain III. Strengthen Community Action
This domain concerns supporting community members as co-creators, leaders, innovators, mentors, and problem-solvers. It also includes LightHouse’s relationship to the organized blind community. Blind consumer organizations, including chapters and affiliates active throughout California, are themselves longstanding forms of community action: blind people organizing, advocating, mentoring, and building culture on their own terms. LightHouse does not need to duplicate that work, but its relationship to that ecosystem, including partnership, mutual respect, shared advocacy, and space for organized blind voices, shapes how strong community action can become. Two recommendations anchor this domain.
Distributive Leadership, Community Power, and Organizational Resilience
Core idea. LightHouse should explore distributive leadership as a strategy for organizational resilience, community leadership development, and executive succession. Distributive leadership means intentionally spreading leadership capacity, knowledge, and decision-making influence across many roles and people, rather than concentrating it in a single executive. This recommendation is especially relevant to the CEO search, future executive transitions, and organizational design. It is not a proposal to redistribute Board authority.
Why it matters. Traditional nonprofit structures often concentrate strategy, visibility, and decision-making at the top. That can create fragility, especially during leadership transitions. Disability justice asks organizations to center leadership of those most impacted. Health promotion asks organizations to strengthen community action and build capacity across systems, not only at the top of them.
Stewardship opportunities. LightHouse can consider how to flatten the pyramid without eliminating accountability. That could mean designing executive leadership so institutional knowledge, access expertise, community relationships, operational wisdom, and innovation are distributed across multiple roles and pathways. It could also mean creating clear succession planning, leadership cohorts, advisory structures with real influence, and opportunities for staff, community members, volunteers, and participants to help shape solutions alongside formal leadership. The organization becomes less dependent on any single leader, develops future leaders before crisis requires them, and grows stronger because power, knowledge, and responsibility are shared in ways that support accountability and resilience.
Blind-Led Innovation, Community Incubation, and Leadership Development
Core idea. LightHouse should explore how it can become a stronger home for blind-led innovation. This means not only serving blind people, but helping blind people create solutions, test ideas, lead projects, build resources, and develop new models for community wellbeing.
Why it matters. Communities are often strongest when the people most affected by challenges are supported in developing and testing solutions. Blind people carry professional expertise, lived experience, cultural knowledge, and creative problem-solving capacity. Too often, those ideas remain informal because there is no structure to resource, evaluate, or scale them.
Stewardship opportunities. LightHouse can explore fiscal sponsorship (an arrangement in which an established nonprofit extends its legal and financial infrastructure to community projects so they can receive grants and donations without forming their own organization), along with micro-grants, project incubation, leadership cohorts, innovation labs, technical assistance, grant-writing support, mentorship for emerging leaders, community-designed pilots, and partnerships that help blind-led ideas move from concept to practice. Clear guardrails would matter: mission alignment, transparency, access, DeafBlind access, language justice, evaluation, and community benefit. Because much of this work depends on outside partners and funding, this recommendation also connects to Domain V.
Domain IV. Build Healthier Policies and Practices
This domain has two sides, and both matter. Outwardly, it concerns LightHouse’s advocacy to change public policy so that the systems around blind people, including transportation, healthcare, employment, education, and digital accessibility, become healthier. Inwardly, it concerns the policies and practices LightHouse adopts for itself, so that the organization models the access, transparency, and inclusion it advocates for in the wider world.
Domain IV and Domain V are related but distinct. Domain IV is about what policies LightHouse advocates for and practices. Domain V is about who LightHouse partners with and how it resources and sustains that work. The two reinforce each other, but keeping them separate helps the Board see policy commitment and partnership strategy as different decisions.
Ableism as a Public Health Issue
Core idea. LightHouse should explicitly connect its strategic plan language around ableism and disability justice to public health. Ableism is not only a social justice issue. It is also a public health issue because it shapes the conditions that affect health, autonomy, participation, and wellbeing.
Why it matters. Ableism affects health through transportation barriers, inaccessible healthcare, low expectations, employment exclusion, inaccessible information, housing instability, isolation, barriers to education, and lack of autonomy. Digital accessibility deserves particular emphasis: when websites, mobile applications, patient portals, benefit systems, and job application platforms are inaccessible, blind people are cut off from healthcare, employment, civic participation, and information itself. Current federal pressure to delay or weaken accessibility requirements for health and human services makes this an active policy front, not a settled question. Ableism also has an economic dimension: inaccessible systems impose real costs on blind people, including extra time, paid assistance, additional technology, and transportation workarounds, which makes anti-ableism an economic justice issue as well as a health one.
Stewardship opportunities. LightHouse can use ableism as a public health frame in advocacy, grant writing, partnerships, community education, program evaluation, and strategic planning. This does not replace civil rights language. It adds another layer: barriers created by ableism produce health consequences, and anti-ableism is a health promotion strategy. The same lens applies inward. Healthier internal practices include hiring and promoting blind people, ensuring blind people hold real leadership roles, making internal systems and tools fully accessible to blind staff, and building a staff culture in which access needs are met as a matter of course rather than negotiated as favors. An organization that advocates against ableism externally while tolerating it internally undermines both efforts. Used consistently, this frame lets LightHouse help change the public conversation about blindness, asking not only how blind people adapt to inaccessible systems, but how systems must change so blind people can live, work, learn, receive care, travel, connect, and lead.
As the domain introduction noted, this work also depends on healthier internal practices beyond anti-ableism alone. Consent-centered governance turns transparency and meaningful participation into standing policy, and the language and DeafBlind access commitments described under Domain I are policy commitments as much as leadership ones. Both are addressed more fully under Domains II and I respectively.
Domain V. Reorient Systems Through Partnership and Innovation
This domain concerns building partnerships with public health, universities, healthcare, workforce, transportation, and disability organizations, and opening new funding and systems-change pathways. A central premise of this domain: LightHouse does not approach these partnerships as a supplicant asking for resources. It approaches them as an expert partner bringing something most institutions cannot find anywhere else: deep blindness expertise, community trust, lived experience, access and accessibility knowledge, anti-ableism practice, and a direct relationship with the blind, low vision, and DeafBlind community.
Public Health Partnerships, Systems Change, and New Revenue Pathways
Core idea. LightHouse should use the public health and health promotion framing to open new partnerships, funding pathways, and systems-change opportunities. This does not require LightHouse to become something different. It requires recognizing that much of what LightHouse already does is relevant to public health, health equity, and community wellbeing, and that LightHouse holds expertise these systems need.
Why it matters. California contains extraordinary public health, research, healthcare, disability rights, technology, transportation, and university ecosystems. Few blindness organizations sit in the middle of that environment. Universities and research institutions increasingly fund community-based participatory research (CBPR), a research model in which community members are co-investigators who help design studies, interpret findings, and share authorship, rather than serving only as research subjects. LightHouse is unusually well positioned for that role: no university disability studies department or school of public health combines blindness expertise, community trust, service delivery, advocacy, and lived experience the way LightHouse does. Healthcare systems are a second concrete lane. Blind people navigate healthcare differently: informed consent and privacy when documents are inaccessible, reading prescriptions and medical records, communicating with providers, and navigating physical spaces. Healthcare systems face growing requirements around health equity and accessibility, and LightHouse holds exactly the expertise they need to meet them.
Stewardship opportunities. LightHouse can explore partnerships with universities, public health departments, healthcare systems, transportation agencies, workforce development programs, disability organizations, researchers, community health organizations, and philanthropy. In each of those conversations, anti-ableism training, access and accessibility consultation, and inclusion expertise are deliverables LightHouse brings to the table, not just values it holds. Grant and partnership pathways could support community health research, health navigation, blind-led innovation, community listening, employment and participation models, DeafBlind access, emergency preparedness, and evaluation. New revenue pathways may emerge because funders can see the health value of belonging, leadership, access, community connection, and anti-ableism. Specific funding lanes to explore appear in Appendix B.
This domain is also where blind-led innovation reaches its full scale. The fiscal sponsorship, incubation, and pilot structures described under Domain III become systems-change tools when paired with the university, public health, and philanthropic partnerships described here.
Measuring What Matters
If LightHouse treats belonging, blind pride, mentorship, leadership, community listening, participation, and anti-ableism as part of community health, it should also consider how to measure those outcomes without reducing them to narrow service counts.
Traditional measures remain important: number of participants, service hours, jobs obtained, trainings completed, funds raised, and programs delivered. But they do not fully capture the social model heartbeat. A person may attend a gathering and find the mentor who changes their life. A youth may go to camp and begin imagining a better future. An adult may volunteer for a small project and become a leader. These are organizational outcomes even when they are not easy to count.
The outcomes most likely to bring LightHouse’s existing measures up to date and centered on the needs of those most affected become clearer when viewed through a health promotion lens:
- Belonging and social connection.
- Blind-positive identity development and blind pride.
- Mentorship relationships and exposure to blind role models.
- Movement from participant to contributor, mentor, or leader.
- Community trust and perceived transparency in governance.
The goal is not to turn every community experience into a metric. The goal is to avoid measuring only what is easiest to count. Health promotion work often requires mixed evidence: numbers, stories, patterns, listening data, community feedback, and examples of lives and relationships that changed over time.
Several of these outcomes, including belonging, Blind Pride, leadership pathways, and community trust, are also the kinds of results that major funders such as PCORI, NIDILRR, and RWJF may be interested in supporting and evaluating when they are defined clearly and measured responsibly.
What Becomes Possible
This report is not asking LightHouse to become something different. It is asking LightHouse to recognize, strengthen, and build on what it already does at its best.
What becomes possible when belonging is treated as a core outcome? More blind people arrive isolated and leave connected. More people stop seeing blindness as the problem and begin naming ableism. More people move from receiving support to offering support.
What becomes possible when blind pride and blindness culture are cultivated? LightHouse becomes a place where the phrase “Blind and Proud” is not only remembered from opening day or community history. It becomes an ongoing practice of mentorship, culture, and leadership.
What becomes possible when leadership of those most impacted is resourced? DeafBlind people, multilingual community members, youth, seniors, people with multiple disabilities, and those most affected by barriers help design the solutions that affect their lives.
What becomes possible when the social model is recognized as public health in action? LightHouse can explain its value to funders, public health partners, universities, policymakers, and community members in a language that makes visible what the community has long known: this work changes lives.
What becomes possible when LightHouse sees itself as community health infrastructure? The Board can make decisions not only by asking what services will continue, but also by asking what conditions will help the blind community connect, lead, belong, innovate, and thrive for generations.
The strategic funding pathways outlined in Appendix B offer concrete ways to resource and sustain this work over time.
Appendix A: Public Health and Health Promotion Language for Board Use
Community health infrastructure: The people, places, relationships, programs, practices, and institutions that help communities stay connected, informed, resilient, and able to participate in life. In this report, LightHouse is community health infrastructure because it helps create conditions for connection, autonomy, leadership, belonging, and anti-ableism.
Social determinants of health: The social, economic, community, and environmental conditions that shape health and wellbeing. For blind people, these include access, autonomy, transportation, communication, employment, housing, healthcare, education, social connection, and freedom from ableism.
Health promotion: The work of enabling people and communities to increase control over the conditions that shape health. In this report, health promotion includes developing personal and leadership skills, creating supportive environments, strengthening community action, building healthier policies and practices, and reorienting systems toward access and participation.
Ableism as a public health issue: Ableism becomes a public health issue when it shapes the conditions that affect health. It can do so through inaccessible transportation, inaccessible healthcare, employment exclusion, low expectations, isolation, lack of privacy, lack of autonomy, and barriers to community participation.
Social model of disability: The social model locates many barriers not in disabled bodies, but in environments, systems, policies, attitudes, and social arrangements. In this report, the social model is described as public health in action because it changes conditions around people, not people themselves.
Disability justice: A framework developed by disabled activists of color that goes beyond legal rights to ask whose leadership is centered, how ableism intersects with other systems of oppression, and whether communities themselves hold power.
Internalized ableism: The way disabled people can absorb society’s low expectations and negative beliefs about disability and turn them inward, limiting their own sense of what is possible.
Substantial Gainful Activity (SGA): The earnings threshold set by the Social Security Administration above which a person can lose disability benefits. SGA-aware participation pathways are designed so people can contribute and earn without unknowingly jeopardizing benefits.
Community-based participatory research (CBPR): A research model in which community members are co-investigators who help design studies, interpret findings, and share authorship, rather than serving only as research subjects.
Distributive leadership: Intentionally spreading leadership capacity, knowledge, and decision-making influence across many roles and people, rather than concentrating it in a single executive.
Fiscal sponsorship: An arrangement in which an established nonprofit extends its legal and financial infrastructure to community projects so they can receive grants and donations without forming their own organization.
Blind-positive culture: Blind-positive culture treats blindness as a valid and valuable way of being in the world. It includes blind pride, mentorship, role models, community traditions, high expectations, leadership, and the shared knowledge of blind people.
Community resilience: The ability of a community to stay connected, organized, responsive, and adaptive under pressure. LightHouse strengthens community resilience when it builds relationships, leadership, communication, trust, advocacy capacity, and shared identity.
Appendix B: Large Grant and Partnership Pathways to Explore
Aligned with Our Health Promotion Goals
This appendix is meant to be a living strategic map for large funding and partnership opportunities that can help LightHouse strengthen belonging, leadership, trust, and community health. It is organized by the five domains of health promotion work described in the main report. See Appendix A for plain-language definitions of public health terms.
Each section offers one or two focused project ideas. After the ideas are the most relevant large funders to explore right now, with a short note on why they fit and a direct link. All details change, so please verify current deadlines and eligibility. LightHouse brings something these funders rarely see in one place: deep expertise in blindness, DeafBlind access, anti-ableism, and genuine community trust. Pair every grant effort with community listening, benefits counseling expertise where earnings are involved, and clear commitments to DeafBlind access and leadership of those most impacted.
Domain I. Develop Personal and Leadership Skills
While LightHouse already teaches many practical skills, this domain highlights the deeper outcomes that are often assumed rather than intentionally built and measured: belonging, blind-positive identity, Blind Pride, strong mentorship relationships, and real pathways into leadership and contribution. These are health-promoting conditions that help people move from isolation to connection and from receiving support to offering it.
Project Idea: Intentional Blind Pride, Belonging, and Mentorship Infrastructure
Create structured mentorship programs and peer support networks with the explicit goal of building blind-positive identity and belonging. This would be especially valuable for seniors with acquired vision loss (who often arrive grieving and carrying messages that vision loss ends independence) and for youth and families. The work would include intentional pairing with blind role models, opportunities for participants to become mentors themselves, and simple ways to track belonging and pride as real outcomes, not just skills learned. This is about preserving and growing blindness culture so more people arrive isolated and leave connected and proud.
Project Idea: SGA-Aware Contribution and Economic Participation Pathways
Design flexible, benefits-safe ways for blind and DeafBlind people to contribute their skills and leadership (through stipends, short-term consulting, peer mentoring, or project roles) without the fear of losing disability benefits. Include strong benefits counseling from the start and clear pathways from small contributions to larger roles when someone is ready. This protects people economically while expanding who can belong, lead, and be recognized as a valuable community asset.
Funding to explore right now
- NIDILRR (the main federal research institute focused on disability, independent living, and rehabilitation research, part of the Administration for Community Living). They fund multi-year projects on training, mentorship, leadership development, and community participation, often in the range of several hundred thousand to nearly a million dollars per year. Search current opportunities at https://acl.gov/grants/open-opportunities or on Grants.gov using “NIDILRR” or CFDA 93.433.
- Broader ACL programs (Independent Living Services, Aging and Disability programs beyond NIDILRR). These support community integration, peer support, and leadership development for people with disabilities, including older adults with acquired vision loss. https://acl.gov/grants/open-opportunities
- California Workforce Development Board High Road Training Partnerships. Recent rounds have had large funding pools (tens of millions) with awards up to several million dollars for disability-inclusive workforce and leadership pathways. https://cwdb.ca.gov/cwdb-home/grant-information/
- PCORI (Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute). Supports projects that build community leadership and capacity alongside research on how people with sensory differences access healthcare and experience better outcomes when systems are accessible. https://www.pcori.org/funding-opportunities
Domain II. Create Supportive Environments
This domain is about the physical spaces, relationships, culture, and governance practices that help people feel they belong and can trust the organization.
Project Idea: Enchanted Hills as a Blindness-Centered Community Resilience Hub
Upgrade and position Enchanted Hills Camp as a year-round resilience center built for and with blind, low-vision, and DeafBlind people. This could include accessible emergency communication systems, transportation coordination during power shutoffs or wildfires, and ongoing programs that build skills, connection, and Blind Pride for youth, families, and adults. The site already brings people together across generations; this work would strengthen it as a safe, welcoming place that also prepares the community for climate and emergency challenges while deepening belonging.
Funding to explore right now
- California Strategic Growth Council Community Resilience Centers (CRC) Round 2. This timely state program has planning grants up to $500,000 and a large pool for implementation projects. Applications open in July 2026. Nonprofits are eligible, with priority for projects serving vulnerable and rural communities. Review the accessible guidelines and NOFA here: https://sgc.ca.gov/grant-programs/crc/ (see Round 2 Materials).
- Additional California emergency preparedness and resilience funding (Cal OES and related state/federal programs). These could complement Enchanted Hills work by supporting accessible emergency communication, transportation coordination, and year-round resilience programming for blind and DeafBlind communities. Verify against any existing LightHouse or Enchanted Hills grants before pursuing. Search Cal OES and related resilience funding opportunities via https://www.caloes.ca.gov/.
Domain III. Strengthen Community Action
This domain supports community members as leaders, innovators, mentors, and problem-solvers rather than only as people receiving services. It also includes LightHouse’s relationship to the organized blind community and blind-led innovation.
Project Idea: Blind-Led Innovation Incubator with Fiscal Sponsorship
Create a clear, accessible structure that helps blind and DeafBlind people turn their ideas into real projects, including new tactile tools, parent and family support networks, community-designed access audits, public health storytelling, or small social enterprises. LightHouse could offer fiscal sponsorship (so projects can receive grants without forming their own nonprofit), small start-up funds, mentorship, and help with evaluation. Strong standards for DeafBlind access, language justice, and community benefit would guide the work. This keeps creativity and power in the hands of blind people while turning good ideas into sustainable community assets.
Funding to explore right now
- RWJF (Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, a major national philanthropy focused on health equity). Their Health Equity Research for Action program supports community-rooted work that builds power and leadership. https://www.rwjf.org/en/grants/active-funding-opportunities.html
- Ford Foundation Disability Rights focus area. They have a significant multi-year commitment to disability justice and leadership work. https://www.fordfoundation.org/work/challenging-inequality/disability-rights/
Domain IV. Build Healthier Policies and Practices
This domain connects ableism to public health outcomes and makes sure LightHouse models the access, transparency, and inclusion it advocates for in the wider world.
Project Idea: Ableism as a Public Health Driver: Research and Internal Modeling
Study and document how ableism affects health and daily life for blind and DeafBlind people (through inaccessible healthcare and informed consent processes, transportation barriers, employment exclusion, isolation, and loss of autonomy). Develop practical tools and advocacy messages and use the findings to strengthen LightHouse’s own internal practices around hiring, promotion, accessible systems, and consent-centered governance. This frames anti-ableism as a measurable health strategy rather than only a values statement.
Funding to explore right now
- NIDILRR (see Domain I for link and description). Strong fit for research on barriers, participation, and rehabilitation outcomes.
- The California Endowment. Major California health equity funder that supports community power-building, policy and systems change, and improving conditions in underserved communities. Strong alignment with framing ableism as a public health issue. https://www.calendow.org/
- NIH (National Institutes of Health), especially through institutes focused on disability, aging, child health, or health disparities, usually in partnership with universities through Community-Based Participatory Research (CBPR), where community members with lived experience help design, lead, and interpret the studies alongside researchers. Excellent for rigorous studies on how ableism and access barriers affect health outcomes. Search via https://grants.nih.gov/.
Domain V. Reorient Systems Through Partnership and Innovation
This domain uses LightHouse’s expertise to build partnerships with public health, healthcare systems, universities, workforce agencies, and other disability organizations, opening new resources and systems-change opportunities.
Project Idea: Blind Health Navigation, Autonomy, and Informed Consent Initiative
Partner with healthcare systems and public health departments to co-design and test a blind-led model for better healthcare experiences. This could focus on accessible informed consent and privacy processes, clear communication with providers, help navigating patient portals and medical records, and transportation support to appointments. The goal is greater autonomy, trust, and better health outcomes for blind and DeafBlind people while giving health systems practical tools they need to meet equity and accessibility requirements.
Funding to explore right now
- PCORI (Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute). Funds research on how people with sensory differences, including blind and low-vision people, access healthcare, experience informed consent, and achieve better health outcomes when systems are designed accessibly. Their large phased awards are especially relevant. https://www.pcori.org/funding-opportunities
- HRSA (Health Resources and Services Administration). Large federal funder supporting health workforce diversity, rural health access, and improving care for underserved populations. Strong fit for blind health navigation models and peer workforce pathways. https://www.hrsa.gov/grants/find-funding
- NIH (see Domain IV for link and CBPR explanation). Excellent for university-partnered research on healthcare access and outcomes for blind and DeafBlind people.
- The California Endowment (see Domain IV for link). Supports health equity and systems-change partnerships in California.
What Becomes Possible
When LightHouse pursues these aligned opportunities, it can resource the deeper work of belonging, Blind Pride, and leadership that often goes unmeasured; protect and grow places like Enchanted Hills as community anchors; generate evidence that shows ableism itself is a health issue; and build sustainable partnerships that value blind expertise. These pathways do not ask LightHouse to become something new. They help it do more of what it already does best: creating the conditions where blind people connect, lead, belong, and thrive.
Appendix C: Final Reflection and Acknowledgments
From Refusal to Belonging: Blind Positivity, Blind Pride, and Community Health
The roots of this report reach back almost twenty years to my first semester in a Master of Public Health program. In one of my first classes, community health professor Vivian Chavez assigned a major project: write about a community.
Vivian wanted me to write about the Blind community.
I’m
I refused.
I had just moved to the Bay Area and was still struggling to make sense of my own blindness. I was anxious and adamant. I tried to convince her there was no Blind community to write about. Looking back, I can see that my refusal had less to do with whether Blind community existed and more to do with my own relationship to blindness. I understood blindness as something to manage, adapt to, or overcome. I did not yet understand it as culture, relationship, leadership, pride, or health.
What I could not see then was that the assignment would take me nearly twenty years to complete.
This final reflection does not name every person who has shaped my blindness journey. It names some of the people, relationships, institutions, and experiences most connected to this report and to the journey from refusal to belonging, from belonging to Blind positivity, and from Blind positivity to Blind Pride.
At its best, LightHouse has been more than a service provider. It has been a gathering place, a workplace, a training ground, a community hub, and a place where Blind people and supportive community members encounter one another in ways that build skill, identity, confidence, leadership, friendship, and belonging.
That is health promotion in practice.
I want to acknowledge the Board and executive leadership of LightHouse, past and present, and the many people who have carried the responsibility of sustaining an institution that has served Blind people across generations. Our community is deeply interdependent, and the Board carries real weight in holding that interdependence together. I am especially grateful to board members Chris Downey, Josh Miele, Tim Elder, Jerry Kuns, Ting Sue, Mina Sun, and Jamie Crane, whose leadership, support, and commitment helped shape both LightHouse and my experience within it. I recognize this work is not always easy, and I hold that with gratitude and understanding.
It is also, I have come to learn, a series of relationships, each one teaching me something the last one had not.
Bryan Bashin was my first Blind mentor, more than eighteen years ago. He taught me that it was respectable to be Blind. Through his leadership, he introduced me to Blind community, disability culture, and the possibility that blindness could be understood as something more than loss or limitation. He opened conversations about sexuality, blindness, and disability long before those conversations were common in blindness services. Bryan showed me that leadership can create permission and make room for questions the field has not yet learned how to hold. His belief in me, and the opportunities opened through my employment at LightHouse, helped me become a nationally recognized contributor and leader in my field. Today, I bring the messages of Blind positivity I learned at LightHouse, centered on access, accessibility, and inclusion, into public health and reproductive justice spaces.
That same belief in blind leadership shows up in Tim Elder, President of the National Federation of the Blind of California. Tim has always supported the work myself and others are doing to build a culture of consent in the Blind community, and I deeply appreciate that support. His own work reaches far beyond that, into legal advocacy and so much more that protects and strengthens our community. I have learned a great deal from him about make systems change on a larger level. I I am proud to continue learning and growing as I now serve alongside him on the board of our California state affiliate.
Leadership opened doors. Lisamaria Martinez was the one who carried that leadership into the daily work of changing how I thought and talked about my own blindness. She was my direct supervisor at LightHouse, and she helped me understand that blindness itself was not the problem. Ableism was. She helped me recognize how deeply low expectations, shame, and ableism can become embedded in our own thinking. I watched her take on hard conversations, move toward power rather than away from it, and speak truth to power. Through her friendship, advocacy, leadership, and example, she helped me move toward confidence, Blind positivity, and a stronger sense of self.
If Lisamaria taught me to name ableism, Bobbi Pompey taught me how to keep unlearning it. She is a dear friend, and our friendship has gone far deeper than the work we have done together. Through it she has helped me unpack not only my own internalized ableism but many of the biases I carry, and that work has shaped the frameworks I use and the way I think. She also helped me understand that belonging is not accidental. Access can get someone through the door, but belonging determines whether a person can participate fully once they are inside. Bobbi showed me that healthy communities are built through intentional practices of consent, accountability, care, and shared responsibility.
That same community that taught me belonging also taught me how to debate, challenge, and grow inside it. Through Jim Barbour and the National Federation of the Blind, I encountered another important part of my journey. Jim has been an endless sounding board, debate partner, mentor, and friend. He introduced me more deeply to the language of Blind positivity and Blind Pride and helped me understand that community is not only support. It is also challenge, accountability, shared expectation, and collective power.
That collective power needed a public health frame, and Sherry Pablo helped me build it. As a fellow public health professional, she has been a trusted sounding board, thought partner, and collaborator. She helped me think beyond individual experience and toward community conditions, systems, assets, and capacity. Her questions and insights strengthened the public health frame of this report and helped keep it grounded in an asset-based understanding of community. I am grateful for her contributions and for the ongoing conversation we will continue to build.
Many other people across these same communities shaped this journey too, including Kathy Abrahamson, Tony Fletcher, Scott Blanks, Serena Olsen, Jamey Gump, Rocky Gomez, Amy Mason, Christina Daniels, Starrly Winchester, and many others. Their friendship, feedback, mentorship, challenge, humor, and community support helped shape my understanding of blindness, belonging, leadership, service, and Blind positivity.
Two of the people most central to this journey are no longer here to read it. Beth Berenson and Doug Mochidome have both since passed. Beth was my first true Blind friend, the one who adopted me, my son, and my guide dog Tabby, and I will always cherish the time we shared at Family Camp. Doug, as my Department of Rehabilitation counselor, saw possibilities in me I could not yet see for myself, and his support changed the direction of my life. They are both gone now, but our conversations still play in my head, and the lessons each of them taught me have stayed with me and shaped who I have become.
And through all of it, my family has been there. I am endlessly grateful to them, and to my partner Gareth Storm, for his editing advice, patience, and steady presence.
For many years, I believed blindness was something to endure, adapt to, or overcome. The people and communities acknowledged here helped me discover something different. Blindness can also be a source of culture, leadership, connection, identity, and pride.
That discovery did not come from one person, one program, or one service. It came because LightHouse made space for Blind people to encounter one another, and because Blind people were treated not only as recipients of services but as sources of knowledge, mentorship, creativity, and care. That is one of the central arguments of this report. Blind people are not only beneficiaries of community. They are among its greatest assets.
And so I return to Vivian Chavez. Nearly twenty years ago, she asked me to write about a community I insisted did not exist. I thought she was asking me to write about blindness. I understand now that she was asking me to write about health, the kind that is made through relationships, belonging, leadership, shared knowledge, mutual support, and care.
This report is my answer to the assignment I once refused, written two decades later by someone who finally knows she belongs. I offer it with gratitude, with pride, and with deep love for the community that taught me how to belong.
If anything in these pages stays with you, I would welcome the chance to keep talking. You can find me at laura@lauramillar.com or 925-321-8804. Whatever comes next, I am grateful to be in this community with you, and glad to keep building it together.