Voluntary Agencies: A New Look

Abstract

Voluntary agencies in the future will face new responsibilities. Two fundamental changes that have already begun to occur are the reordering of priorities in the federal program of income maintenance for handicapped persons and the availability of a more accurate picture of the actual composition of the blind population of the United States. The changing role of the federal government, and state governments too, means that the services of private agencies must be re-examined and updated to insure that all necessary services continue to be provided. The recognition that the majority of blind persons are in the older age category and that there are very great numbers of persons with very limited, but still useful, vision means, in the first case, that independent living is not the only goal that clients need help in achieving and, in the second, that new approaches to helping partially sighted persons need to be developed and implemented. Finally, as an outcome of these and other changes, agencies for the blind must expand the ways in which they can work cooperatively with private and governmental agencies and the ways in which volunteers can be utilized most efficiently.