Pictured above, left to right: Matt Bingay representing WMRA Engineering, Oakley Pearson, Warner Sandquist, (standing, award presenter, Col. Oscar Beasley) Jane Fuller, Tom DuVal representing Public Radio WMRA. Not pictured: Nancy Jones representing Dr.Ronald Carrier.

Individual Citations, 2001 Merit/Non-Vol. Awards:

Ron Carrier. Citation: During a distinguished term as President of James Madison University, Mr. Carrier was instrumental in the effort to acquire the entity later known as public radio WMRA, whose license would eventually be held by the university's Board of Visitors. Among Mr. Carrier's specific motivations for doing so was to attach at least one "sideband" broadcast stream to the main signal, for the purpose of public service. At present, public radio WMRA is the host station for the Valley Voice reading service for the blind -and has been so for nearly twenty years. Valley Voice broadcasts on a subcarrier / sideband of WMRA. Thus, Mr. Carrier is a co-founder of the Valley Voice, and none of the Valley Voice's subsequent charitable accomplishments would have been possible without his relevant public-spirited decisions. Further, Mr. Carrier agreed to lend his good name to the Valley Voice Friends as an honorary member of the Board of Directors, thereby enhancing the community stature of the Valley Voice's vital support organization.

Jane Fuller. Citation: As an instigator and founder of the Valley Voice [organized 1982], Ms Fuller's contribution is self-evident: no subsequent charitable accomplishments of the Valley Voice would have been possible her public-spirited efforts.

Oakley Pearson. Citation: Mr. Pearson has poured countless hours into the cause of reading-for-the-blind through his work managing Talking Book Center in Staunton. Also, for no reward (except the knowledge that he was doing a much-needed service), he has acted for years as a distribution agent for Valley Voice's Subcarrier units in Augusta county, saving Valley Voice time and expense of long-distance delivery. He helped in the process of setting up initial discussions between Staunton local government and Valley Voice, which would eventually lead to the Valley Voice audio presence on Staunton CitySpan TV. Mr. Pearson has long been a leading force among sight-conservation service organizations.

Warner Sandquist. Citation: Mr. Sandquist, a Volunteer and current executive officer of the Board of Directors of the Valley Voice Friends, voluntarily exposed himself to dangerous hazard for an extended period of time while installing an essential test antenna for the Valley Voice Waynesboro area television signal project. Three stories up on a steeply pitched rooftop with sparse foothold areas, Mr. Sandquist kept to his task for hours even while a wind-squall with sustained winds in excess of twenty five miles-per-hour blasted at the antenna and occasionally launched tools into the distance. Mr. Sandquist had earlier distinguished himself through assistive action vital to the founding of the Valley Voice Friends; none of the Valley Voice Friends' subsequent charitable accomplishments would have been possible without his public-spirited decisions. Such action came after Mr. Sandquist had already spent many years as a leading force among sight-conservation service organizations.

WMRA Engineering. Citation: Given in recognition of specialized knowledge, effort, skilled labor, and resources given to Valley Voice throughout the years --from Valley Voice's initial organization in 1981, to the present-- without which the reading service in its present form would not have come into being.

WMRA Administration. Citation: Given in recognition of specialized knowledge, effort, skilled labor, and resources given to Valley Voice throughout the years --from Valley Voice's initial organization in 1981, to the present-- without which the reading service in its present form would not have come into being.

Honorees not present: Al Faulk, P.Buckley Moss, David Ferguson, Harrisonburg City Council, Lori Rothengass-Miller.






More info about the medals on this page: Awards We Give.

State of the Sevice, 2001, Terry Ward, Long Version --Not Used at Event:

Later this morning we will recognize our longest-serving Volunteers and some others who have been vital to our charitable mission.

Our Volunteers make life a little better for hundreds of people who are blind, partially blind (or who have a medical print-handicap), and who want Access to local news, opinion, and civic information. Much of that material is distributed in Print -a format with which the blind have obvious difficulties. The Valley Voice Volunteers read time-sensitive print matter (newspapers, magazines) and the Valley Voice Staff broadcasts the readings on subcarrier band radio and elsewhere. The Board of Directors of our booster organization, the Valley Voice Friends helps raise awareness and funds so that operations may continue and expand.

None of us are "reporters". We don't go out and cover news. We read existing newspapers for blind people, including the Daily News-Record, the News Leader, the Daily Progress, the News Virginian, the Winchester Star, the Observer, C-Ville Weekly, Eightyone, the Journal, the Herald, the Banner, locally-relevant parts of the Washington Post, and also various magazines. We feature such a variety of papers because our subcarrier broadcast signal does go from Woodstock to Waynesboro, Luray to Ottobine. Right in the middle is the hub of Harrisonburg. We have a Cable TV presence in Rockingham County and Harrisonburg: Adelphia customers will find us on Channel Three where we are the audio background on Harrisonburg CitySpan TV. Shentel Cable is in the process of giving us (praise shentel: Giving Us) a Shenandoah County Cable TV presence. We do hope someday to reach long-underserved areas like Charlottesville and Lexington -perhaps by the incoming generation of Cable TV relay lines, perhaps somehow using the internet .

Our Volunteer readers do pare down to mere headlines the National news and State-news likely to appear on commercial radio or TV news. We do that because people can get those stories from other sources; us reading and broadcasting such mater would be redundant. We emphasize the content that is only available in print. We read the "Main Street level" news entirely. We read newspaper editorials and letters to the editor entirely. We read obituaries, weddings, engagements, Dear Abby, area news, and civil notices. We air what TV and radio does not.

Think of news buzzwords we've encountered in the last few years: landfill, bypass, rezone, school board, sludge, bulldoze, parking, golf course, National Forest, budget cut, permit, students, battlefield, water quality, mayor, immigrants, construction, red light camera, S.O.L., downtown, police chief, Transportation Plan, windmill, governor, I-81, crime, farmland, growth, fuel bill, preservation, new facility, traffic, tax, park land, Rocco, Dunham-Bush, J.M.U., Charlottesville, Elkton, Staunton, Harrisonburg. Think of the discussions, the debates, the ideas, the votes, the occasional Revolutions in the local status quo which have occurred over the years. Whatever the issue, whatever sides one takes, knowledge of local issues and public opinion is vital to anyone who wants to have an active role. It is self-evident that informed citizens are better able to participate in society.

And so we broadcast newspapers. The Valley Voice is Not a talking book center. Most book centers are federally funded entities putting books onto tape. Putting newspapers and other time-sensitive material onto tape would be folly: by the time it's recorded and dubbed onto hundreds of cassettes (and mailed out) it would be last month's news. That's why newspapers are broadcast.

Our funding system is different too: the Fed is not directly involved; instead, the local community very much is -at least to the extent it feels like donating. My co-worker and I do get paid, but Not through donated funds; rather, we serve at the pleasure of the Governor and the General Assembly of Virginia -they are the ones who approve a stipend for our part-time salaries. The Valley Voice's operating overhead is quite low because the public radio station whose license JMU owns, Public Radio WMRA, kindly lends us office space-and usually looks the other way when we mooch some of their Xerox paper. For nearly twenty years, Public Radio WMRA has let us broadcast on a sideband (a subcarrier) of their flagship frequency. The funds needed to get our service right to a person in need, those funds come from local donations (and whatever grants we can obtain). You might be surprised to learn how expensive that part of our work can be.

When the Valley Voice was set up almost twenty years ago, regulations, finances, and radio reading service tradition dictated the broadcast method: subcarrier-band radio -which cannot be picked up with traditional AM-FM radios; It can only be heard on a subcarrier band radio.

Most radio reading services purchase specialized subcarrier band radio receivers and lend them free of charge to medically-qualified people: a Fine system -in Flat terrain with few obstructions. Such obstructions just might include three-thousand foot tall mountains ranges. Subcarrier band signals are quite weak, hills batter them, causing extreme static. Here in the hilly western edge of Virginia, cheaper subcarrier band receivers don't work well. Terrain as hilly as ours requires top-of-the-line receivers. Because quality subcarrier receivers cost nearly $100 each, it took a long time for the Valley Voice to reach even 500 people.

The popular perception is that 500 listeners must be enough. Who has ever observed a group of even a dozen people with white canes around here? Who has seen a hundred blind people? 500 receivers in the field must have been more than adequate for the region, right?

Probably so -if only people didn't have this bothersome habit Of Aging.

The typical sight-impaired person is not someone blind since childhood, reading Braille, relatively well-adapted, using a white cane or guide dog. Look at the more common medical conditions which take away people's sight: diabetes, cataracts, retinitis pigmantosa, macular degeneration, strokes. You can put most of it all together and respell it "o-l-d a-g-e": old age. The next blind or partially-blind person you meet might be someone you already know: maybe your neighbor, your co-worker, your boss, your best-friend, your spouse, your Self.

A couple of years ago, Valley Voice Development Director Rob Munro noticed a startling statistic and applied it to our own area. He noticed that the Library of Congress' National Library Service says that three percent of the general population qualifies for charitable audio-reading formats: talking books, reading services, et cetera. The figure skyrockets among the elderly, but we kept our estimates as conservative as possible by using the simple three-percent figure. At that time, three percent of the Valley Voice's subcarrier signal coverage area was more than 8,500 people. We had around 1,000 receivers in the field then, meaning that around seven thousand five hundred medically-qualified people were still out-of-touch. Leaving such a need unattended would be irresponsible, yet the prospects of raising over a half-million dollars necessary to buy thousands of subcarrier receivers were bleak -considering the historic record of local donations from businesses and the general public.

It was time for hard decisions and assertive steps. We changed our broadcast schedule and procedures to maximize local content. We set up ways to broadcast local content 24 hours a day -whether or not a person was present to load a tape or operate the audio mixing board. We established and incorporated a booster organization, the Valley Voice Friends. We began a moves to get our service more widely available at a lower cost -particularly onto TV. More about those challenges and progress we've made addressing them in a moment.

In almost twenty years, the Valley Voice has grown considerably -but grown in a good way. The office expenses, the bureaucracy, have remained Stable over the years. It is the number of people-in-need we serve which has seen the growth -that's the way a non-profit charity Should grow. The numbers grew steadily but slowly, always in proportion to local giving. The number of people served in the beginning of the year 2000 (a number it took us nearly twenty years to reach), we more-than doubled This year -thanks to our Cable TV signal.

The Valley Voice's roots go back well before the eighties. Ron Carrier, during a distinguished term as President of James Madison University, was instrumental in the effort to acquire what would become the Valley Voice's host station: the entity later known as public radio WMRA, whose license would eventually be held by the university's Board of Visitors. Recent Mr. Carrier explained that one of his specific motivations for bringing a radio station to campus so was to attach at least one "sideband" broadcast stream to the main signal -for the purpose of Public Service. That public service sideband is Us. The good graces and patience of WMRA's management and WMRA's Engineering Department, including engineers Ellsworth Neff, Don Mussell, Bill Fawcett, and occasional interns have been essential. It was Jane Fuller who organized the Valley Voice into a functioning organization, with the first subcarrier broadcasts airing in 1982.

There were 80 receivers in the field in 1983, according to an old newsletter. After Mrs. Fuller, other Directors came and went. A non-governing Valley Voice Advisory Council gave guidance. Valley Voice became a member of the United Way. Many Volunteers fondly remember Lori Rothengass (now Lori Miller), who began leading the organization while still a student. Her energy and effort left a lasting impression. The receiver count neared 500 by the year 1990.

The mid-nineties hurt. Citing low pay and a high work load, a series of Directors left shortly after being hired. Few were present longer than two-and-a-quarter years. The "learning curve" phase any new hire goes through (and also the "candidate search time" Between having Directors) meant that there were frequent periods when the organization was leaderless. A key method of raising funds was through personal appearances by Directors before civic groups. The method is impractical when there is no Director.

Advisory Council absenteeism and "early retirements" grew. Donations were low. There was a nasty catch-twenty-two with Most business gifts. Business gifts were frequently contingent upon our ability to broadcast a "thank you" message before a large audience -and our ability to do That (remember the high cost of subcarrier receivers) required a lot of money. However, a few local companies were always there for us, especially Riddleberger Brothers and also the Green Valley Book Fair. For their loyalty and consideration we are grateful.

Much of the press was ignorant of our activities or relevance. The general public had little idea what a reading service was or why it was important. Placing "awareness" advertisements was problematic: they cost money, they seldom brought in gifts from the public, but often they did result in a few new requests for services from us. The public still Gives Most to charities it is most aware of: hospital, rescue squad, church, hospice, cancer, heart, lung, hunger, shelter, save-the-whales, save-the-ducks, save-the-Bay, save-the-air, Salvation Army, Red Cross, United Way. Worthy causes, but it leaves little for unfamiliar charities or those without a publicity budget.

I did mention that the Valley Voice was once a United Way member, but there were few public donations to the United Way specifying Valley Voice as a recipient. One of our two-year directors objected to the restrictions the United Way placed on our fundraising -especially when the financial benefits of membership were comparatively low. That director withdrew us from the United Way. (Why I kept us out comes later).

The broadcast procedures were labor intensive, and it was hard to recruit enough Volunteers to fill all of the necessary shifts. At times more than half of the active Volunteers were students who were recruited because they had free time -their ability to Read Well during a broadcast was a secondary consideration. Some of our students of the period were excellent workers whether behind a microphone or behind the scenes. We remember Kelly Hall and "Tireless" Tony Taylor particularly fondly. At the time, fluctuations in the Volunteer pool were extreme; when half of your workforce is made of Volunteer Students, the end of each Semester upends the schedule.

This was the situation in 1998, when the Executive Director job was split into two easier part-time positions, in hopes of keeping leaders in place a little longer. Long-time Valley Voice stalwart Rob Munro became the Development Director and I became Executive Director.

One decision was easy: I chose Not to put us back into the United Way because I dislike the practice of soliciting donations from workers at their place of employment, and also because I object to the salaries of the top United Way officials. That decision gets me a few dirty looks. After all, the United Way is a "sacred cow", and the worst of the United Way salary headlines were from around Five years ago. Yet the online journal Charities Today reported that (according to the United Way of America's own IRS Form 990 filed for tax year 1998) the United Way of America's President and CEO, Ms Betty Stanley Beene, was given In salary and benefits Three Hundred-Thousand, six-hundred thirty-three dollars*. Numbers Twice as large would not Detract from the sincerity and honest hard work of the United Way's Local representatives. Still, I cannot fathom why the national head of a Charity should get a Six-Figure Salary, and as such (dirty looks or not) I am not comfortable with re-establishing the official relations.

We finished a pending project left over from a past Director: putting a signal onto Cable-FM radio. That was a big advance for a service whose broadcasts Had Been only available on subcarrier receivers -our thanks go to Harrisonburg Adelphia Cable.

A major grant for automation computers arrived, eventually letting us broadcast local content at any hour, With- or Without a person present to push a "play" button on a tape player. Until then, our "after hours" programming was a reading service network piped in from New York over a static-plagued satellite connection. Airing Local content "24-7" made us more relevant to our own community -and boosted the audio quality of our programs considerably. Many thanks to the Virginia Association for the Blind and also to our colleagues to the south, the Voice of the Blue Ridge.

The software which runs the system was not ready to use "right out of the box." We struggled to learn its operating code while the maker issued a stream of updates, patches, and repair modules -many of which Disabled other parts of the system. Over twenty manufacturer's software updates later, the system works -No thanks to me. Many thanks to Rob Munro and also WMRA's Bill Fawcett and Matt Bingay.

We could not improve the Donation situation without providing a place where information about us is available at a glance. I changed our two-page "name and address" website into a fifty page monster. There is exhaustive detail about us on the web now -and it helps. People still have little idea what we do, but now we can say "you can find out anything; go to www.valleyvoice.org".

I decided to create a non-profit 501(c)(3) charity booster organization to help the Valley Voice. It is the Valley Voice Friends. It has No paid employees; it has an unpaid governing board. It's job is to raise money and awareness. Creating a separate booster organization with no ties to J.M.U. or the state opened up possibilities for us: credit card donation through our web site, www.valleyvoice.org , charity raffles, property gifts, and more.

Obstacles non-cash gifts were my biggest motivator. Previously, if someone had given us a non-cash, non-paper gift (a car, a house, an antique, the Hope Diamond) the Valley Voice would not have been able to benefit. Regulations told us to take such property and Trash it; use it functionally; give it to another office to use functionally; or Surplus it -where it could eventually go to Richmond to be sold for the General Fund's benefit, not ours. Now we can direct non-cash donors to the Valley Voice Friends, who will liquidate the item and give the funds to the Valley Voice. The Valley Voice Friends has contacts able to liquidate the most bizarre assets -even industrial property, rolling stock, and vehicles of any sort. For this reason, duty once called me to climb with camera in hand up a hundred-ten foot tall tower crane -there was a donation possible. That deal did not work out, but it did make for some interesting snapshots -visible on the Crane Page of our website: www.valleyvoice.org. These make for more interesting viewing than the Bylaws and Articles of Incorporation of the Valley Voice Friends, but these also are on our website: www.valleyvoice.org. For vital assistance establishing the Valley Voice Friends, our thanks go to Accountant Geraldine Rush and Lawyer Steve Heitz. Warner Sandquist's help was timely and instrumental. So was that of Rob Munro, who covered my back while I spent hours learning how to write up incorporation documents (so that we could save on legal fees).

Rob also covered for me when I spent a Thanksgiving break trying to improve the look of our Volunteer's workspace with paintbrushes and lots of lumber. There are pictures of the Mostly-Free Faclity Facelift on our website: www.valleyvoice.org I built a mantel from scrap wood. It is decorated with chipped and damaged antique store castoffs -unsellable as antiques but somewhat presentable as office knickknacks after some touching-up. Mirrors came from state Surplus. J.M.U.'s Facilities Management assembled shelf units; Lowes of Harrisonburg donated some trim wood. All told, it's probably a Volunteer-retention factor --and it sure looks better in there than it used-to. The office, right across the hall from here, is open for the curious today.

Other news: This year, the International Association of Audio Information Services gave the Valley Voice's Rob Munro a national honor by electing him to their governing board. JMU's own Ron Carrier recently became an Honorary Director, an event likely to open a few more doors for us.

We have been trying to recruit more community leaders to our side. The website information helps. We are grateful to international artist and humanitarian P. Buckley Moss for lending her good name to our cause as an Honorary Director of the Valley Voice Friends. She is the artist who makes those calligraphic paintings of Mennonites, barns, and geese which seem to be hanging in a Quarter of all offices in the Mid-Atlantic region. Last year she also gave us a hand-overpainted print for us to raffle off, and has arranged to do so again.

Last year's raffle went so well that we continued buying subcarrier receivers as usual, but also had a chance to buy equipment to put a signal onto a Cable TV text-information station. We approached Harrisonburg City Council about taking music out of the background of their civic information station, Harrisonburg CitySpan. Why have Background Music when the Audio can also be a public service? Put the Valley Voice on in the background! For less than the cost of twenty subcarrier receivers, we could reach roughly 21,000 households where Harrisonburg CitySpan is available. Hundreds of them are medically-qualified for our service. We could double our print-impaired audience, for once without costing the Valley Voice the expense and installation-time of individualized radio receivers. The project would be paid for by the Valley Voice Friends, Not the Harrisonburg taxpayers. Vice-Mayor Peterson moved for a vote which the Council approved unanimously. Our thanks to City Council, and also to City Manager Roger Baker (whose position did not allow him a vote, but did require him to deal with the occasional headaches when the system was installed). Again we were indebted to the Harrisonburg office of Adelphia Cable. Adelphia Cable customers in Harrisonburg and western Rockingham county will find Harrisonburg CitySpan (with us in the audio background) on channel three.

Shentel Cable is giving us a similar set-up in Shenandoah County, though this time the cable company volunteered to pay for the equipment. We are working on a TV presence in Augusta and Page counties. Hopefully, those in charge of the newest cable regional lines will think of us. We continue buying subcarrier receivers, target purchases toward the medically-qualified people who (for financial or geographic reasons) don't have Cable.

We still read and broadcast so that the blind, partially-blind, and medically print-handicapped have access to time-sensitive print-matter. Now, however, our efforts are better able to reach those in need. Having doubled in one year our print-impaired listenership audience numbers (which had taken almost twenty years to build up) we look forward to the next few years of progress.

[intro next speaker]

*FACT SOURCE: "United Way of America" listing in Charities Today: http://www.charitiestoday.com/e_o_c/charity_search/u/united_way_of_america.html About: United Way of America, 701 North Fairfax Street, Alexandria, VA 22314. (703)836-7112.

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