When he started going blind 20 years ago at the age of 41, Fernando Amigon turned to Vision Loss Resources for guidance. The nonprofit offers a full suite of classes for the visually impaired, teaching everything from basic home cooking and cleaning to braille instruction and computer skills.
Amigon eventually found work with Contract Production Services, VLR’s sister company, a for-profit packing plant that employs workers to insert everyday retail items into the packaging customers see on store shelves.
The company, which maintains an 86,000-square-foot packing warehouse adjoining the VLR offices in Little Canada, has been his home away from home for much of the last two decades. So much so that tactile guidance strips on the floor lead from his work station to the bathroom and break room.
“I used to be able to see lamp light,” said Amigon in Spanish on Tuesday, as he inserted 3M respirators into their cardboard and plastic casings at a clipped pace. “For six years, it’s been nothing, nothing, nothing.”
Comprehensive institute for the blind
Instructor Jenny Stenner, left, talks with Lauren Holecko, who is deaf and blind, using tactile signing in a classroom at Vision Loss Resources in Little Canada on Tuesday, April 23, 2024. (John Autey / Pioneer Press)
When Minneapolis-based Blind Inc. shut its doors last December after 38 years in operation, Vision Loss Resources became the Twin Cities metro’s only comprehensive institute for the blind. That’s led to an uptick in clients for VLR, which only recently relocated from Minneapolis but is already on the verge of outgrowing the suburban office and factory floor space it acquired off Interstate 694 and Interstate 35E in 2022.
Together with a sister nonprofit, DeafBlind Services Minnesota, VLR serves upwards of 200 vision-impaired clients per year in a training setting some might liken to a small community college, helping to ready both the newly blind and long-standing visually impaired for an ever-changing world.
“It’s almost like you’re getting an associate’s degree in independent living,” said Matt Kramer, who became president and chief executive officer a year ago of both nonprofits and the for-profit packing operation that helps sustain them. “How do you know what the stove is set at? How do you run a washer-dryer? These are real courses. We have real class periods.”
From typing class to braille
According to the American Foundation for the Blind, some 85,000 to 92,000 Minnesotans report vision difficulty, meaning they have trouble seeing even when wearing glasses, if they can see at all.
Matt Kramer, CEO and president of Vision Loss Resources (VLR) in Little Canada, on Tuesday, April 23, 2024. (John Autey / Pioneer Press)
In VLR’s technology class, the goal is to get visually-impaired students to type at 30 words per minute. Instructor Shawn Bangsund never touches a mouse or turns on his computer screen as he scrolls its icons, whose names are read aloud to him at a rapid pace by screen-reading software.
He slows the reader down for the sake of a reporter, but he’s accustomed to it describing what’s on the unlit screen before him at a speed that most would find unfathomable.
“For the average person, it’s just gibberish,” said Bangsund, with a laugh. “I never have to worry about the average person overhearing what I’m typing.”
In a small training room around the corner, braille instructor Melody Wartenbee guides two students in how to read books using a computer-assisted braille display. Wartenbee, who described herself as a prolific reader of nonfiction, quips that she’s “20/20 blind,” or completely blind since birth. Still, there are others with even more fundamental challenges, requiring the help of two additional instructors to teach a student who is both legally deaf and blind using hands-on communication.
Instructor Shawn Bangsund, who has been blind since birth, listens to a program that reads the contents of his computer to him, thus he doesn’t need his monitor to be on, while in his classroom at Vision Loss Resources in Little Canada on Tuesday, April 23, 2024. (John Autey / Pioneer Press)
In yet another training room, Paul Hall took advice from instructor Lauren Chuba, a former VLR student who went on to become a public school teacher before returning to the nonprofit as an educator.
“I’m just trying to get back to the older version of me,” said Hall, who has been using VLR services, off and on, since 1992. A former motorcycle rider, he now navigates unfamiliar corners with the help of a cane. He can see shapes, but has no depth perception or peripheral vision, he said, and he relies on a smartphone camera reader to identify store items.
In addition to classes, VLR offers a support group to help the newly blind cope with what they’ve lost and understand the new community they may be gaining. Clients have arrived with blindness associated with traumatic brain injuries, stroke and even a gunshot wound to the eye.
“Vision loss is traumatic,” said Kramer, a former president and CEO of the St. Paul Area Chamber of Commerce. “Generally speaking, it doesn’t come back.”
A top packing producer for the Midwest
Kramer noted that VLR’s contracts with the state, which are largely based on reimbursements for lessons taught, only go so far, especially when some 30% of students miss class, which he called a near-inevitability with a vulnerable population.
To make up funding, VLR relies on Contract Production Services, which maintains nearly 150,000 square feet of warehouse packing or staging space in Little Canada, St. Paul and Roseville.
“We’re easily one of the top producers for packing in the Midwest,” Kramer said.
Dozens of workers, most of them Central American immigrants, place retail items into consumer-facing packaging, which are then trucked to Target, Amazon and Walmart warehouses, among other distribution centers, for eventual sale across North America.
Amigon, who has spent a total of 13 years working for Contract Production Services off and on, is the company’s only visually-impaired employee, and a key reminder to workers and trainers alike of the mission they’re there to support.
While some other nonprofits offer classes for the blind in particular skillsets, VLR is the only remaining nonprofit in the Twin Cities that offers what Kramer described as a “comprehensive suite” of life skills training, he said. Before Blind Inc. closed its doors on Jan. 1, VLR saw some 20 to 25 clients per month, in settings where one-on-one instruction is often essential. That’s grown overnight to at least 30 clients, and as many as 40 clients in a single month. The combined annual budget for the two nonprofits is about $2 million.
Blind Inc.
Workers assemble and pack items for customers at the Vision Loss Resources’ Contract Production Services facility in Little Canada on Tuesday, April 23, 2024. (John Autey / Pioneer Press)
In a public statement last December, Blind Inc. blamed its sudden closure, in part, on its inability to keep up with the “millions of dollars in renovations” needed at its headquarters, the historic Pillsbury mansion in Minneapolis, which “must be done in a manner that preserves its historic character.”
The nonprofit said it was working with the National Federation of the Blind to hopefully reopen.
“The Blind Inc. situation is supposed to be a temporary pause in services,” said Chris Danielsen, a spokesman for the federation, on Wednesday. “They didn’t know exactly when they planned to reopen. They’re trying to figure out a path forward.”
Not every student at VLR is visually impaired. In a teaching kitchen, Nyia Vang, a new administrative assistant to the director of the State Services for the Blind, wears vision-altering simulator goggles that allow her to experience the challenge of completing basic everyday tasks with a kind of tunnel vision.
On Tuesday, her second day of training, Vang successfully made a sandwich and a smoothie.
There were some unnerving moments along the way, “especially when I had to wear the blindfolds and walk upstairs,” said Vang, who will complete four weeks of training before returning to state offices, where she’ll help connect the visually impaired to similar types of instructional services.
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