Before Hadley's Steve Kelley found his way into the field of vision rehabilitation and assistive technology, he was a computer user trying to stay in the game—despite his own vision loss.
Twenty-five years ago, the computer was Steve’s livelihood. As an online columnist, he lived and worked on the screen — and then an unexpected vision loss got in the way. The path back, he'll tell you, was slow and bumpy.
After receiving vision rehabilitation services for himself, Steve went back to school and earned two master's degrees—one in vision rehabilitation and the other in rehabilitation counseling. Since then, he’s built a career helping others navigate what he'd been living through.
Along the way, Steve learned about what Hadley offered and often shared Hadley's resources with his clients. So when a position opened up at the organization, he jumped at it.
Today, as a Practical Help Specialist, Steve spends his days on the phone with Hadley members. "I think a lot of people will start with an initial question," he says, "and sometimes if they're put at ease a little bit, I'll start to hear a little bit more about what's going on with them, and I can direct them to something else Hadley offers, or help them find resources in their own community."
What he hears most often is a phrase members carry home from the doctor's office: There's nothing more we can do. "People feel so isolated when they hear that," Steve says. His job, as he sees it, is to tell them the rest of the story.
He thinks about a member who had Linux computers sitting in his basement — a man who'd spent his career in the computer business and hadn't turned any of them on since losing his vision. A few years after connecting with Hadley, that man called Steve to say he'd enrolled in an online cybersecurity degree program. "He just needed to figure out how to get from there to here," Steve says. "And once he did, he just ran with it."
That's what Steve is after in every conversation. "It's all about empowering," he says. "I want people to leave feeling, 'there's more that I can do about this. There's something here that I can grab hold of and move forward with.'"