Expanding our Perspective

In October, the Education Department partnered with the Hearts for Sight Foundation to provide a Nature Exploration Day for 28 members of the blind and visually impaired community. Program participants experienced a guided, multisensory introduction to Catalina from the heights of Airport in the Sky to the shore at Little Harbor.

“This tour challenged us to reimagine our education experience,” noted Conservancy Community Learning Manager Hillary Holt. “It pushed us to perceive the Island in a genuine and curious way, discovering new ways to interpret information.”

Participants handled Catalina’s rocks as well as leaves of native Catalina plant species, experiencing their unique features and adaptations such as their texture and the smell of different types of sage. At different locations, those who joined paused to determine the position of the sun as part of learning more about vegetation communities on the Island.

Holt noted that a reward of working with like-minded partners such as Hearts for Sight “is to be told by a visually impaired participant that they had been to Catalina before as a sighted person, but this time they felt like they truly saw the Island.”

The Conservancy is grateful for the partnership with Hearts of Sight and looks forward to implementing what we learned from this group in order to grow our accessibility initiatives.