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The Need for Support
What Your
Gift Means to RFB&D's Santa Barbara Unit
$ 57 enables RFB&D to produce and circulate a copy
of one textbook to a student with a disability
$ 75 covers the cost of enrolling one local student as
an RFB&D member
$ 171 pays for the average number of audio books a student
needs for one course
$ 275 pays for an adapted playback device and headphones
for one low-income student
$ 425 provides audio books to 25 local students with disabilities
through a school membership
$ 600 cover the cost of providing playback software for
four school libraries, enabling 100 students with disabilities
to have access to RFB&D's audio books
$2,096 underwrites the production of one new digital audio
book for the RFB&D library
Funding Priorities
| RFB&D
is a nonprofit organization that relies upon financial donations
from individuals and organizations to support our overarching
mission: to level the educational playing field for students
with print disabilities. Private funding enables us to produce
recorded books and academic materials not available anywhere
else. |
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| Support from our donors also fuels
our efforts to reach out to educators and bring audio book
programs to local schools and other educational institutions
so that their students can have the access to curriculum they
need to be successful learners. |
Our current program priorities
that need your support are described in the links below.
Production of Accessible Educational Resources
RFB&D's Learning Through Listening®
Programs for Schools
RFB&D's Learning Through Listening®Programs
for Individual Students
Development and Testing of Alternate
Recording Styles for Students with Learning Disabilities
Why We Need You
Production
of Accessible Educational Resources
Imagine not being able to see
these words or to understand what they mean. That challenge faces
hundreds of thousands of people around the world who have impaired
vision, learning disabilities such as dyslexia or physical disabilities
and for whom print is a barrier between them and learning. RFB&D
and the Santa Barbara Unit helps to remove this barrier through
its production of audio books and other educational materials
in a range of academic subject areas and grade levels. Audio book
production continues to be a core priority of the Santa Barbara
Unit and needs supports from the community.
Donors may support this program
by "adopting" a text, which covers the production costs
of one digital book produced by the Santa Barbara Unit. Donors
may also fund the production of a collection of texts in a specific
subject area or for a specific school district.
Donations to support the productions
of new audio books can be acknowledged in the opening and closing
announcements of each book, well-suited for memorial and honorary
gifts.
The cost of supporting one
new audio textbook produced by the Santa Barbara Unit is $2,093.
RFB&D's
Learning Through Listening® Programs for Schools
A large number of students
in the Santa Barbara area are classified as special education
students. Some have vision loss, others have learning disabilities
and a majority have reading disabilities such as dyslexia. One
of the greatest academic struggles for these students is simply
keeping up with reading and classroom assignments, because they
do not have access to the curriculum that they are required to
master at grade level.
Many students with learning
disabilities have found that using audio books while reading along
in the print version of the same book can help. We need to increase
our visibility and make sure that all special education students
have the help they need.
RFB&D Santa Barbara Unit's
educational outreach program works in schools throughout the Santa
Barbara, Kern and San Luis Obispo counties so that educators can
discover the benefits of using RFB&D's recorded texts and
literature books and implement audio book programs in their classrooms.
Our staff helps schools with program start-up and provides training
to teachers and students and ongoing technical assistance to facilitate
the use of audio books in a variety of educational settings within
a school.
Funding of educational outreach
is a priority for the Santa Barbara Unit and is especially critical
now as we implement digital audio book programs locally. Donations
to this program will provide seed support to schools, especially
those where school resources are limited. Support includes a one-year
membership in RFB&D, which provides access to the master audio
library; playback equipment for listening stations at the schools;
and training for students, teachers and parents. This support
defrays the start-up costs to the schools, which can range from
$3,000-$5,000.
RFB&D's
Learning Through Listening®Programs for Individual Students
In conjunction with our school-based outreach and training program,
the Santa Barbara Unit provides support to students with disabilities
whose family incomes prohibit them from having individual memberships
in RFB&D. Although some of these youngsters may use audio
books at school, for the most part, they are unable to take the
audio books and the playback equipment home. As a result this
critical resource is not available to them for completing homework
assignments, studying for tests, or even engaging in pleasure
reading.
Development
and Testing of Alternate Recording Styles for Students with Learning
Disabilities
Over the years, the profile
of the students using RFB&D's audio books has altered significantly.
While we still continue to serve a steadily growing number of
students who are blind and visually impaired, the number of consumers
with learning disabilities has spiked dramatically.
Why We Need You
| The production of accessible
educational resources at the Santa Barbara Unit is fueled
by the combined efforts of more than 300 local residents who
volunteer in the Santa Barbara studio regularly. Studio volunteers
are literally involved in every phase of book production,
including text preparation, reading and directing and post-production
quality control. |
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Among the most challenging
of books to produce are those in technical specialty areas,
such as science, mathematics, finance, engineering and technology.
These books are often long and contain large volumes of
information. Because of the technical nature of these texts,
only volunteers with the expertise and experience in these
fields can read them.
The Santa Barbara Unit needs support for the recruitment
of qualified specialist volunteers so that we can begin
to eliminate waiting lists for books in technical subject
areas. Pictured on this page are some of the volunteers
who make such a difference in our members' lives.
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