06 Nov Irven E. and NeVada P. Linscomb Foundation Awards $25,000 Grant to Children’s Center for the Visually Impaired (CCVI)

Children’s Center for the Visually Impaired (CCVI) was recently awarded a $25,000 grant from Irven E. and NeVada P. Linscomb Foundation to support the Early Intervention Program for children with blindness or visual impairment and their families.

CCVI’s Early Intervention Program provides regularly scheduled home-based instruction and therapies and center-based evaluations of the infant and toddler’s developmental progress, beginning as soon as the child is diagnosed through the age of three.  Working with the parents in regularly scheduled home visits, early intervention teachers and therapists provide the strategies and activities that can be practiced daily and generalized to the world beyond.

Many children in the U.S. and in Missouri have some degree of visual impairment. Visual impairment includes greater and lesser reductions in vision; no two visually impaired individuals are the same. The 2016 American Community Survey reported that 502,191 children under the age of 18 have vision difficulty in the U.S. CCVI serves children with visual impairments, blindness, and deaf-blindness, and in the past two decades has experienced a substantial increase in serving children who have multiple disabilities. As a result of the continuum of specialized services provided by CCVI, children and families facing these challenges will have the information, support, and tools to reach their highest potential.

CCVI’s target population is children who are blind or visually impaired, from birth through school age, within a 150-mile radius of the agency. CCVI teachers, therapists, and specialists provide services in the core program areas including the Early Intervention Program (birth to age three), the Preschool/Kindergarten Program (ages two to six), and Outreach Services primarily for school-age children.