Christine Hunsinger
3300 Brownsville Rd.
Pittsburgh, PA 15227-2723
C: (412) 414-1628
Email: cs.hunsinger@verizon.net
1. I am Christine Hunsinger, and I would like to be considered for membership on the ACB Board of Directors if a partial term position must be filled. I am from Pennsylvania, and I have been retired from Federal work for eleven years. I spend a lot of my time working for my state affiliate, the local chapter of my affiliate, the Special interest Affiliates that I belong to, The Rehabilitation Taskforce of ACB, and the Advocacy steering committee of ACB. I am a member of several advisory groups for organizations which are not a part of ACB or its affiliates. Although I am an old soul of 77 years, I have not been active in ACB until seven or eight years ago, so I believe that I bring ideas to conversations which don’t rely on past practices for validation. I have been an active member of my local chapter and my state affiliate for a few years longer. I have a skill set that lends itself to the kind of work that a member of an organizational Board is usually called on to do.
I have always been curious to learn new information and new ways of solving problems. In my work career it was important that I understood complex rules, knew when I needed to do more research to make a good decision, and worked with others to accomplish team goals.
I want to be a bigger part of making ACB the best 21st century blindness Advocacy organization that it can be.
2. I have been the president of my state affiliate for four years, and during that time we have hired several employees being flexible during changing times. Currently, as the immediate past president of PCB I am an advisor to our current president and hope that my knowledge makes her leadership challenges less stressful. I chair several teams which do the work of the organization. I am a “Worker Bee” on other teams. Our president has asked me to continue chairing my teams.
I currently work on the Board of The Braille Revival League and am a member of the Community Involvement Committee and the Budget Committee of that affiliate. I hope that my thoughtful questions in board meetings and my willingness to serve on a committee and be a worker within the group reflects well on me.
I am a member of the Alliance on Aging and Vision Loss, and I have joined wholeheartedly in the advocacy efforts of that affiliate for older blind individuals, answering the call of the president to help steer the membership committee. I am a member of Library Users of America, and have not been active in the work of the board, but libraries, books, and reading are important to keep all of us as informed as we can be.
I joined BITS so that I could try to keep up with changing Assistive Technology.
As the chair of the Rehabilitation Taskforce, I have wrestled with how a small group can make a significant impact within the larger organization. I think that as I look at the tasks I have conducted as a volunteer, my experience has given me a chance to learn more about leadership which ACB can take advantage of with me as a board member.
3. The most important challenge facing ACB at this time is becoming an agile 21st century organization taking advantage of the technology available to reach that goal. For example, this could include new funding and marketing strategies to allow for quicker reactions to changing situations.
How do we take account of member concerns at the board level because we guide the organization? The feedback email is a first step. We can do so much more using technology.
We need to address issues not directly related to blindness, but which affect blind people.
We need to listen to and support the young people who may be interested in aspects of their vision journey that we either never had to think about or that we solved so long ago for ourselves that we hardly think them worth considering.
We need to be mindful of those who lose vision later in life and are not a part of ACB.
We need to reach out to those who in the past have not thought of ACB as an ally, but whose lives are affected by vision loss along with other negative factors such as poverty, hunger, physical or mental illness, an information deserts since they cannot see to read as they might have in the past.
Cultural, racial, and ethnic differences have been a barrier to many who felt uncomfortable in the organization. Some or many of these people may not even join us. That doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t work for better solutions for them. We need to walk in the shoes of people who are not like us, and we need to listen to and learn from those who are different from us and become more tolerant of differences and more willing to work together with other organizations possibly outside of blindness groups.