Outlook on Radio Western

From Ski Patrol to Ketchup On Pancakes to Outlook. The podcast that started it all celebrates five years this summer!

Thanks to Kerry for coming up with the idea to start a podcast in the first place. Back on May 14, 2016, when we recorded for the first time, a pilot under the name Ski Patrol, we never could have imagined it would evolve into a show with a focus on advocacy that would air on the radio. But we also never completely wanted to hang it up, so Ketchup On Pancakes returns with episode 20!

We start even before then, back in 2015 and discuss Brian’s accident which resulted in a new outlook on life. From there, we speak casually on the years that followed and revisit the segment we called 5 W’s and an H, wha? How do our answers compare to these questions when asked in 2016 to now?

We look back on prior episodes of KOP and discuss many of the highlights over the past five years. We also reminisce on all the other segments we came up with for KOP: Reading, Writing, No Arithmetic; Strings and Strums and Sounds and Drums; Catch Up On the Current, and finish off this landmark episode with our classic segment, Cassette Clip of the Week.

Note: We are slowly adding all Ketchup On Pancakes episodes to our Outlook On Radio Western rss feed. Here are links to the first couple, “Intro to Us” and “Ingredients Listed”. Check back for more, though you’ll have to scroll to the bottom of the feed or search for Ketchup On Pancakes to find them all, as they were uploaded before Outlook began in September of 2018.

https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/ketchup-on-pancakes-episode-1-intro-to-us/id1527876739?i=1000531526330

https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/ketchup-on-pancakes-episode-2-ingredients-listed/id1527876739?i=1000531526329

Not a Kerry connection this time (as it’s been coined) but one from the other host of this podcast. It’s a Brian booking! Brian and Laura met, as teenagers, back in 2001 at the MIRA Foundation in Quebec, where they went for training for guide dogs. It’s social media which has allowed them to reconnect, something that wasn’t around when they last met in person and we’re glad they have and that we could have her on Outlook this week.

In her most recent role as an on air personality at Accessible Media Inc., Laura Bane has experienced a varied array of activities, from repelling herself down a three story building to rowing a giant, hollowed out pumpkin across a river, and even circus school over the last five years.

She was diagnosed with Retinitis Pigmentosa (or RP) at the age of four, but recently (in her mid thirties) has had her diagnosis come into question a little. She has a degree in philosophy and is now leaving the security of her position at AMI to get a masters in social work.

Employment and employability is a subject we like to discuss often on this show, to make people understand that with disability in the picture, finding paid work is not always made easy and once we do find some, it feels like a big risk to even consider giving that up. The three of us discuss the difference it makes to a blind child to have the right supports to be successful in their education, what it looks like when one doesn’t get that, and how to eventually find your passions and achieve your dreams, even when disability can make that more challenging.

As a bonus, Brian includes a couple cassette clips from 20 years ago of Laura and himself at Mira. While conjuring up memories from the past, Laura came across a sketch of him she drew when there which is posted on the Soundcloud page for this episode.

It’s not easy to find others who can whip out their eye (prosthesis) in a crowd, as a Halloween party trick. One of us hosts on Outlook can do this, but doesn’t. Justin Evangelho can and does.

Question is, is he an evil genus, a magician, a childhood cancer survivor?

Answer is, maybe all three, and he’s our latest guest on Outlook. We discuss his evolution from creative writing to audio recording/editing along with education for disabled students in a public vs Catholic School Board. We speak about his talk show Disenabled where he focuses on people with physical disabilities and the skills and techniques they use to foster independence. It’s available both on Trent Radio and as a podcast. We discuss the music review show he hosts on Trent Radio over the summer called Bottom40in40.

We met Justin at an event through Peterborough Independent Podcasters, in March 2021. We were happy to have him at his first ever Canadian Federation of the Blind convention and his perspective, as a young blind person in Canada today, is a valuable one we’re happy to get to share on this show.

Note: The episode of Disenabled we appear on is not yet available online, but be sure to check out previous episodes of his podcast here:

https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/the-disenabled-podcast/id1549168294

And give a listen to his music review show Bottom40in40 all summer long, Tuesday evenings at 9 PM EST:

http://trentradio.ca:8800/hi-fi

June is Deafblind Awareness Month and we finish off the month with Penny Leclair.

This week on Outlook she speaks to us about resilience and accepting the inevitability of change in one’s life.

We learn about her experiences, being born blind and losing her hearing over time. She tells us about her journey with hearing aids, cochlear implants, two hand manual, and interveners.

Penny has never let the things others have told her she couldn’t do be her limits. She wanted to be a mother, she wanted to try online dating later in life, and her advocacy to spread the word across Canada on the necessity of interveners for deafblind Canadians motivates her to speak out.

June is also the month Helen Keller was born and to think of all she did, before most of what is available in these times was even an option. That didn’t stop Keller and nothing stops Penny Leclair from living a full life with a mission to improve services for Canadians who live with a whole new disability, not only blindness and not only deafness.

Check out this week’s episode to hear the story of the first time Penny heard birds and rain and CBC radio after years of increased isolation.

Intervener services must increase for people in every province and territory because it’s truly an essential service if ever there was one.

Getting your first guide dog is a challenging, exciting, life changing thing, as the two of us both know very well. We find out about this and more from this week’s guest on Outlook.

Jinnie Saran has been a youth representative and now mentor, with an organization out of British Columbia, Canada known as Blind Beginnings, along with her work with the Camp Bowen Society.

Today we speak with Jinnie about how she researched and chose The Seeing Eye (the oldest guide dog school in North America), on the lack of representation in literature and media which has Jinnie exploring her options studying English/creative writing/journalism/history/editing, and on matters surrounding diversity and identity as we grow into who we are.

During June and Pride Month, pride and this discussion has us exploring intersectionality, with one of the members on the recent panel, “In Their Own Words,” from our recent Canadian Federation of the Blind convention. Finding pride in living as blind people and in our own abilities takes time and effort, but Jinnie is a part of Blind Beginning’s Limitless podcast and all three of us agree that it’s better to ask “how can each of us do the things we want to do” rather than stopping at “can’t”.

“No” to limits and “yes” to a greater level of representation and accessibility, nothing stopping our latest Outlook guest from doing all the things.

Follow Jinnie on Twitter:

https://twitter.com/jinniesaran

Learn more about Blind Beginnings and both the Limitless podcast and blog where Jinnie is a contributor on their official site:

https://www.blindbeginnings.ca

Find the other Blog posts Jinnie writes for Camp Bowen here:

https://cobd.ca/author/pl-6019e53f1304e70012154dd5/

In the month following our 2021 first ever all virtual Choices and Goals Canadian Federation of the Blind Convention, we’ve been hard at work to bring together the highlights of this year’s event.

This week on Outlook, we continue with Part II, with us two, continuing on as the MC’s). From the weekend of convention, finishing off on May 1 where we led a diverse session day, full of insightful speakers (Natalina Martiniello from Braille Literacy Canada, Ben Fulton on housing discrimination, Doris Belusic and Kerry on The Blind Canadian, etc). In this episode of Outlook we share people’s big plans and ideas looking to the future for a better Canada for its blind citizens.

Listen to Part II with another door prize draw with a humorous element (awkward), some truly touching moments of our co-host/sibling relationship demonstrated from over the weekend, and a banquet lineup of speakers (CFB President Mary Ellen Gabias, NFB Rep Scott LaBarre), all highlighting, through shared experiences, the themes of making choices and the setting of/carrying out of goals.

From the awkward moments, to the touching ones, to the truly profound - all this was at the heart of the entire 2021 Canadian Federation of the Blind convention.

To learn more about the people and presentations featured on this episode, check out the convention webpage. Also included are imbedded YouTube videos from the event.

https://www.cfb.ca/save-the-date-2021-cfb-national-convention-choices-and-goals-april-30th-may-2nd-2021#

Videos can also be found directly from our YouTube channel here:

https://www.youtube.com/user/CFBdotCA

In the weeks since our 2021 first ever all virtual Choices and Goals Canadian Federation of the Blind Convention, we’ve been hard at work to bring together the highlights of this year’s event.

This week on Outlook, we begin with Part 1, with us two as the mc’s from the weekend of April 30th, welcoming a diverse two days of sponsoring companies and insightful speakers.

Door prizes (read with the help of an OrCam), accessible tech presentations (Canadian Assistive Technology, HumanWare), and the adrenaline filled few days of panels on intersectionality and parenting..

Listen to Part 1 with the exhibit hall presenters, funny mishaps of an all virtual Zoom convention, all with the theme choices and goals and the diversity we are talking more about across Outlook episodes. We also feature clips from speakers and organizations who have appeared on Outlook in the past (NNELS, Talk Description to Me, CNIB monopoly report).

Find out more about the presentations and speaker’s featured on this episode by taking a look at the convention page here:

https://www.cfb.ca/save-the-date-2021-cfb-national-convention-choices-and-goals-april-30th-may-2nd-2021

And we’ll be back, next week, with Part 2 of an extraordinary weekend including news of what the Canadian Federation of the Blind (CFB) and its flag ship magazine (The Blind Canadian) have been up to, about the value of braille literacy with Braille Literacy Canada (BLC-LBC), and a lawyer’s story of housing discrimination towards him as a lawyer with a disability. Not to mention our fabulous banquet to round out the festivities. Stay tuned.

This week, on Outlook, we spend the first half of the show sharing our own, personal thoughts on the recorded presentation from the recent Canadian Federation of the Blind convention we featured last week. In the second half, we feature another inspiring presentation from the convention; a panel Kerry put together called Diversity and Intersectionality: In Their Own Words.

At our 2021 first all virtual National Canadian Federation of the Blind CFB’s Choices and Goals Convention, back on May 1st, Daryl Jones (with expertise in economics) presented a report he’d put together on a topic we’re not so sure Canada is ready to hear but we are done being silent on.

The Canadian National Institute for the Blind (CNIB) has been around for over 100 years now and has been developing a monopoly all across services and programs and products for the blind, all while we who are blind in Canada feel less heard and more and more misused as charity cases, requiring large amounts of sympathy and even pity toward us, in order to keep the donations coming. We want better for ourselves and our future than being in a parent/child relationship that’s terribly uneven.

The first half of today’s show is us talking about the changes we’d like to see, for all blind people in Canada and how the CNIB has a systemic issue of misrepresenting blindness as a sad state of affairs to the public. We know progress doesn’t happen overnight, but we’re hoping to see a change going forward.

The second half of today’s show is a replay of another session from our recent convention, a diversity panel called “In Their Own Words” which consisted of three panelists who came together to speak about their other intersectionalities, and how those crisscross with the blindness we all have in common. Talking more openly about what makes us “us," as individuals is the kind of progress that makes inclusion a reality.

So check out both halves, both topics as they mean a great deal to us here at Outlook.

With any thoughts on either of these subjects, you can always send us an email. We’re always happy to have an open and honest dialogue with listeners. So feel free to send us a message by emailing [email protected].

And along with listening to last week’s episode where Daryl presents the report, you can read the full paper here:

https://www.cfb.ca/blind-canadian-december-2020#monopoly

Special episode of Outlook today and we’d appreciate it, more than usual, if you’d listen and then share this one around. This week’s episode is full of facts and figures most Canadians and others don’t realize, many others don’t think should be said out loud.

At our recent, 2021 first all virtual national Canadian Federation of the Blind’s Choices and Goals convention, Mr. Daryl Jones (sighted ally) presented a report he’d prepared. It was one of the highlights of the event, judging by the questions that came in after from conference attendees, but we knew it could also ruffle some feathers.

Titled “CNIB: Canada’s 100-Year Monopoly”, finally, someone has done his research, helped give backing to how it feels being blind in Canada today. Mr. Jones has laid everything out, all the reasons why many of us believe the current system for supporting the blind in Canada is not working. It’s not easy for many of us to say it, to pretty much rock the boat when many do depend on the present situation, but a monopoly isn’t good for anyone this organization is meant to serve.

This report is something too, a glimpse for the sighted population, to really listen and learn how it really is for Canada’s blind population. And so we’re presenting Daryl’s presentation on the report, along with a question period at the end, where several blind Canadians make their own thoughts known, adding to a chorus of voices we hope will be heard.

To read the full report, go here:

https://www.cfb.ca/blind-canadian-december-2020#monopoly

The two of us at Outlook took a week off, for an excellent reason, to MC the 2021 Canadian Federation of the Blind Convention. This year, our theme was Choices and Goals and this theme has felt rather fitting in these strange times, us hosting from home in our first all virtual convention weekend, April 30th to May 2nd.

We’re back, this week with an all new show, as we return to one of our mixed bag episodes, a May Mixed Bag with the two of us, talking our first vaccines and what it takes to plan and execute an online event, with a wrap-up on the first four months of 2021 and what we're both lookking forward to now that convention is behind us for another year.