ICEVI News
ICEVI Executive Committee Meeting
The Executive Committee met in May 2001 in Chihuahua, Mexico. Host for the meeting was Centro de Estudios para Invidentes, an educational resource center serving visually impaired students in the city and state of Chihuahua in northern Mexico. The center is also the home base of Carla Herrera, the treasurer of ICEVI. Thanks to Carla’s organizational skills and the CEI staff always available the members of the Executive Committee could concentrate on the extensive agenda without worrying about practical details. Among the issues on the agenda were:
Constitution
The Executive Committee endorsed the fine work that has been done by Colin Low (Royal National Institute for the Blind) on the ICEVI constitution. Colin is now working on the final details of a revised constitution with Nandini Rawal, Secretary and Bill Brohier, Past President. A copy of the revised constitution will be printed in a future issue of The Educator.
Regional Realignment
William Brohier has put in great efforts in studying the regional alignments of various international bodies. At the meeting he put forward a plan to the Executive Committee who endorsed the plan which fits in better with the new World Blind Union (WBU) groupings.
The WBU had spent a great deal of time grappling with the same issue and ICEVI was happy to take full advantage of the research they had already put into this matter. The Executive Committee agreed to a realignment of the ICEVI regions along the same lines as the WBU, with the exception that ICEVI will continue to maintain a Pacific Region. With the adoption of the revised constitution which is expected within the next few months ICEVI will move from 8 to 7 regions as follows:
Africa, East Asia, Europe, Latin America, North America/Caribbean, Pacific and West Asia (which will include the Asian countries of the former USSR and the current countries of the Middle East).
This realignment which has the backing of the current Middle East region will not only resolve some of the difficult challenges currently facing the Middle East but has the additional advantage of making collaboration between ICEVI and WBU much easier. A full listing of countries by region will be published with the revised constitution in a future issue of The Educator.
Nominations Committee
A nominations committee with Richard Porter as chairperson was appointed to prepare the election of the Principal Officers next summer. The other members of the committee are:
The committee is open to inputs from all members. Communication regarding nominations should be sent to:
Mr. Richard
Porter
ICEVI
Nominations Committee
c/o Sight
Savers International
Grosvenor
Hall
Bolnore Road
Haywards
Heath
West Sussex
RH16 4BX
United
Kingdom
rporter@sightsaversint.org.uk
ICEVI Secretariat in India
The Executive Committee made a decision to strengthen the ICEVI Secretariat in India. We are most grateful to Christoffel Blindenmission for their financial support of this work. In the future the layout, printing and mailing of all ICEVI publications and the maintenance of the ICEVI databases will all be coordinated through the ICEVI Secretariat in India. Please direct all communications regarding address changes directly to Nandini at the Secretariat at bpaicevi@ad1.vsnl.net.in.
Strategic Planning
One of the most important issues discussed at the Executive Committee meeting was planning the future direction of ICEVI. If ICEVI is to fully implement the polices adopted at the 10th World Conference in São Paulo the regions must be strengthened by engaging and involving our members, and developing the untapped potential that ICEVI has as an advocate for equalization of educational opportunity at a national, regional and international level.
There were many excellent suggestions that came out of the discussion in Chihuahua, including one that resulted in a Strategic Planning Work Group, which over the next several months will articulate a process for moving forward a strategic planning process. M.N.G. Mani, Jill Keeffe, Carla Herrera and Meredith Tilp (representing Helen Keller Worldwide) and Bill Brohier have volunteered their services to this working group.
The working group welcomes any input that you might wish to make which should be sent to the chair larry@obs.org. Please caption any of your communications on this matter “ICEVI Strategic Planning”.