Donna J. Jodhan World-Renowned Blind Advocate Posts

In this forward-looking episode of Remarkable World Commentary, Donna welcomes back Dr. Alan Chase, founder of the EYE Retreat, a one-week intensive summer program now in its 19th year, hosted at the Governor Morehead School for the Blind in North Carolina, for an update on what’s cooking for the 2026 cohort. Alan walks listeners through how a weekend gathering of about 15 students has grown into a packed week-and-a-half program serving roughly 40 students this summer with a waiting list, staffed entirely by volunteers and funded principally by the Lions Club and the Delta Gamma Foundation. He breaks down the camp’s two parallel tracks, a college track that takes students from choosing a school, picking a major, and learning self-advocacy through navigating course catalogs, accommodations, and campus resources, to a final personal-roadmap presentation; and an entrepreneurship track that walks students from generating a business idea, through fine-tuning, business-plan development, and a Shark-Tank-style investor pitch by the end of the week, alongside the dorm-suite living arrangement of four students sharing two rooms and one bathroom that doubles as a real-world classroom in communication, scheduling, and social problem-solving.

In this deeply nostalgic episode of Remarkable World Commentary, Donna welcomes Paul Gareau, retired Executive Director of the Montreal Association for the Blind (MAB) and architect of the 2006 MAB-Mackay merger that became today’s Lethbridge-Layton-Mackay Rehabilitation Centre, for a conversation tracing his thirty-year journey from Loyola sociology graduate, to University of Toronto Master of Social Work scholarship student, to the lone social worker for 1,800 students at a Sherbrooke high school, and on into the leadership rooms of one of Canada’s most beloved disability-services institutions. Paul walks listeners through residential life at the Penfield Reception Centre, his Concordia Diploma in Institutional Administration earned in night classes while running MAB full-time, and the remarkable breadth of services under his stewardship, from the low-vision clinic, talking-book library, and Gilman Residence to the Philip E. Layton School, the technical-aids boutique, the Employment Integration Program, the Braille production unit, and a service of more than 300 volunteers.

In this candid and deeply motivating episode of Remarkable World Commentary: Donna sits down with Bernard “Ben” Akuoko, social worker, disability advocate, and founder of The Brightside Scope, to trace his journey from a two-year-old diagnosed with retinitis pigmentosa to one of Canada’s most thoughtful voices at the intersection of race, culture, and disability. Ben opens up about the moment in grade three when he realized the other kids could see the board and he could not, the years he spent pretending to read books just to earn classroom stars, and the disorienting friction of growing up in a Ghanaian household where disability was tied to religion and curses, while his school was already teaching him Braille and a white cane that his parents told him to put away the moment he came home. He shares the loneliness of his teenage and twenty-something years, the racial profiling and false theft accusations he has weathered as a Black man with low vision, and the cognitive-behavioral counseling that finally helped him stop hiding his disability, even from friends who had known him for ten years and still did not know what was going on with his eyes.

In this warm and instructive solo episode of Remarkable World Commentary, Donna returns for her second installment of the month with the May edition of Ask Advocate Donna, opening with one of her favorite mantras, “Speak in such a way that others love to listen to you; listen in such a way that others love to speak to you”, and a word-game segment in which she walks listeners through two advocacy-relevant pairs: polite versus impolite, and proactive versus inactive. She makes the case that the polite route keeps an advocate in others’ minds in a positive way, and that being proactive, leading by example, taking the bull by the horns, comes with heartache and high cost but also brings joy and fulfillment that the inactive route, by definition, never delivers.

In this pointed and unflinching solo episode of Remarkable World Commentary, Donna opens the month of May with a warning to her listeners about what she calls the “piggybacking problem”, companies that walk into the blind, vision-impaired, and broader disability community posing as saviors and accessibility experts while, in her words, being “wolves in sheep’s clothing.” She argues that these outfits arrive claiming the expertise needed to make services, websites, and information accessible, and claiming to understand what people with disabilities actually need, when in reality they have never walked a mile in the community’s shoes, have no real grasp of which software works and which does not, and are simply piggybacking on the community’s vulnerability to fill their own pockets.

In this thoughtful episode of Remarkable World Commentary, Donna welcomes Dr. Elizabeth Mohler, newly minted PhD, longtime team member at BALANCE for Blind Adults, and a young leader Donna has known since her earliest days in the field, for a conversation that moves from family kitchen tables in 1980s Brockville to the methodology of critical discourse analysis. Born with congenital glaucoma, Elizabeth walks listeners through her family’s 1987 move to Toronto for services, the formative years she spent at W. Ross MacDonald School for the Blind beginning in grade five (where she found community, learned to cook, and discovered swimming, track, trampoline, and choir), her path as the first student with sight loss at Wilfrid Laurier’s Brantford campus, her Master of Science in Occupational Science at Western, and her PhD in Health and Rehabilitation Sciences on a four-year SSHRC doctoral fellowship, including the pilot work she contributed to make the SSHRC application itself accessible to JAWS users.

In this candid episode of Remarkable World Commentary, Donna sits down with Blake Steinecke, marketer, accessibility leader, and forward on the United States blind hockey team, to trace his journey from a sighted San Marcos, California teenager to a rising young voice in digital accessibility. Blake walks listeners through the summer before his junior year of high school, when slight blurriness in one eye turned into a Leber’s hereditary optic neuropathy diagnosis and the loss of his central vision in both eyes; the steep, often vulnerable learning curve of assistive technology, VoiceOver, JAWS, Braille, a CCTV magnifier, while keeping pace academically; graduating high school above a 4.0 and earning his Bachelor of Science in Business Administration cum laude from Cal State San Marcos a semester early; and his path from software sales and contract accessibility testing into a growth role at an e-learning startup tackling the roughly 70% unemployment rate among working-age blind adults, where he helped drive a 200% increase in marketing qualified leads.

In this heartfelt episode of Remarkable World Commentary, Donna J. Jodhan sits down with Pam Cusick, Senior Vice President of Rare Patient Voice, to explore how patient-centered healthcare research is reshaping the relationship between people living with medical conditions and the companies developing treatments, products, and services for them. Pam traces her 30-year path in the field back to her first job working on FDA blood-donor screening research, then walks through how Rare Patient Voice has grown into a global community of more than 200,000 patients and caregivers spanning 1,500+ conditions across nine countries, compensating participants $120 per hour and paying out more than $8 million directly to patients and caregivers since the company was founded in 2013. She details the straightforward sign-up process, the deeply therapeutic value participants describe in finally being heard without judgment or fear of burdening loved ones, and what Rare Patient Voice’s recent acquisition by Konovo, a tech-first healthcare intelligence firm backed by Frazier Healthcare Partners, means for expanding those opportunities even further.

In this wide-ranging episode of Remarkable World Commentary, Donna J. Jodhan sits down with Kim Charlson, Director of the Perkins Braille and Talking Book Library, to trace Kim’s 41-year journey at Perkins, from losing her vision at age 11, to becoming one of the first totally blind people in the United States to earn a master’s degree in library science, to leading one of the country’s most innovative accessible library programs for the past 24 years. Kim describes how the library has grown far beyond lending books, now offering downloadable audiobooks, loanable Braille e-readers, an audio-described film collection, a professional recording studio, and an assistive-technology “library of things”, a program that helped drive over 900,000 items shipped in the past year alone. She also reflects on mentoring blind professionals into library leadership, noting that five blind directors now lead libraries across the U.S., a barrier she has helped dismantle by example.