Mission Statement
Roselle’s Dream Foundation is a 501©(3) nonprofit charitable organization intended to assist blind persons to live the life they want and to dream as big as they can. It is the intent of the Foundation to help society in general and blind persons in specific understand that blindness is not the characteristic that holds anyone back from achieving all they wish to be.
Roselle Wears Medal
The Four Main Goals
Monetary Scholarships
Provide monetary scholarships to assist blind students, especially elementary and high school, to secure needed assistive technology to help them further their education. We will not be supporting any specific kinds of technologies, but we’ll rather let the applicants for scholarships indicate to us what they wish they need. If they require assistance in choosing technologies we can help with this, or refer them to resources who can advise them. However, our main goal is to assist with the purchases themselves.
Education
Roselle’s Dream Foundation can serve a significant role in assisting to educate the public about blindness and the capabilities of blind people. For the past 13 years Michael Hingson, a New York Times best-selling author, a successful entrepreneur, and a blind man who survived the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center on 911 2001, has been traveling the world speaking about blindness, learning to manage change in our lives, trust and teamwork, inclusion and a variety of other subjects that relate to the goals of the foundation.
Much of the early education efforts of the foundation will involve Michael’s travels and speaking opportunities. As Michael travels and talks about the topics described above, especially using his speaking platform to show, even if just by example, that blind people are as capable as their sighted colleagues we expect more people to become interested in the work of the foundation. Going forward the foundation will also begin conducting audio tele-seminars and webinars about blindness especially to help our aging baby boomer population and the families of baby boomers who are learning to deal with seniors who are losing their eyesight due to age-related diseases. The foundation will also create a blog not only to publish material written by Michael Hingson and other blind persons, but also to provide a form for people to learn and to interact with each other especially on blindness related issues.
Corporate Sponsorships
One of the ongoing goals of Roselle’s Dream Foundation will be to secure and to maintain sponsorships from corporations in order to accomplish the endeavors of the foundation. Our goal is to involve sponsoring corporations in the efforts of the foundation including educating corporations about blindness to encourage them to hire capable and qualified blind persons. Corporate sponsorships will also be used to conduct educational efforts and support Michael speaking tours in places and to organizations that could not otherwise pay Michael to come and speak. Most elementary schools, high schools, some colleges and many smaller companies and nonprofits do not have a budget to bring in a speaker of Mike’s caliber and status. One possible benefit to a corporate sponsor willing to support Michael Hingson’s efforts is the ability to donate to Roselle’s Dream Foundation instead of hiring Mike through his for-profit company, the Michael Hingson Group, Ink. Roselle’s Dream Foundation can receive donations and pay a portion of those donations to Mike’s company for his services.
There are many benefits to sponsors who will assist the foundation and Michael in these efforts. Benefits include making a tax deductible contribution to Roselle’s Dream Foundation to support Mike’s speaking, visibility on both the foundation and the Michael Hingson Group Inc. website, recognition and acknowledgement at Michael Hingson’s talks, opportunities to participate with Mike at various community and organizational events and opportunities to create videos with Mike that will be visible in the media, just to name but a few.
Monetary Donations
A final goal of the foundation will be to secure monetary donations to subsidize scholarships to blind students for the purchase of technology and to support the other efforts of the foundation. In its first year the foundation would like to raise at least $100,000 in donations toward scholarships. While corporate sponsorships will certainly provide some funding that the foundation can use individual and actual corporate donations specifically for scholarships and for other reasons outside the sponsorship world will be necessary and important to the foundation.