Post-News Season to Share, a fund of the McCormick Tribune Foundation, gave $1.79 million to 62 agencies last year serving children, the hungry, homeless and those in need of medical care. Donations are matched at 50 cents for each dollar; 100 percent goes directly to the agencies. To make a donation, see the coupon in today’s paper, call 1-888-683- 4483 or visit .
The magic of this place is how it can turn darkness into light.
You enter Anchor Center for Blind Children and immediately realize that a building can exude personality. It feels good. Light runs through tinted windows, wrapping you in a hug of blue, yellow and red. Laughter bounces off a high ceiling. The long, wide hallway of endless possibility invites a kid to be a kid who runs or jumps or skips.
“When you’re the parent of an infant who has been diagnosed as blind, you’re devastated. You’re grieving. It’s traumatic,” says Sheila Galatowitsch, director of development at Anchor Center. “Then, you come in this place, and you think, ‘Wow. Maybe there’s hope.’ This is a place where a blind child can go for hope.”
In the Stapleton neighborhood of Denver, the Anchor Center opens its doors to blind and visually impaired children from birth through age 5. It makes the same happy sounds of any pre-school, except the cubbies that list names such as Elie and Alex are also labeled in Braille.
“The first time you walk in here, the natural reaction is to think: ‘Poor little blind kids.’ But you forget they’re blind within seconds,” executive director Alice Applebaum says. “We let them be kids.”
In a classroom, when “The Three Little Pigs” is read aloud, real straw and sturdy bricks put children in touch with the story. The smell of lunch wafts from a kitchen built at the perfect height for a toddler. Near the main entrance, there sits a grand piano whose ivory begs to be tickled. Outside, on the school grounds, kids buzz around a sidewalk on tricycles.
Although Anchor Center has been serving Colorado children for a quarter century, a new building designed to the specific task of teaching the blind became a reality in 2007.
Visual impairments can vary widely from case to case, but when the school welcomes a new student, the goal is the same. Empowering a child gives light to dreams.
“Our sole reason to being is to prepare children for kindergarten in the public-school system,” Galatowitsch says.
When a child is blind, the world can seem to be stubbornly encased in shadow and darkness. The Anchor Center is a building with a knack for knocking down walls of limitation.
“We feel like magic happens here,” Applebaum says. “We all need a little magic.”
Anchor Center for Blind Children
Address: 2550 Roslyn St., Denver
In operation since: 1982
Number served last year: 425
Staff: 9 full-time, 10 part-time
Yearly Budget: $1.5 million
Percentage of funds directly to clients/services: 80 percent
