Abstract
Lisa Cellura was a longtime volunteer for the Cleveland Sight Center, a Cleveland based organization for the visually challenged. Their mission is "To provide individualized support and tools to navigate the visual world". In this oral history, Lisa discusses the Cleveland Sight Center, her volunteer work for the Cuyahoga Valley National Park and the importance of accessibility.
Loading...
Interviewee
Cellura, Lisa (interviewee)
Interviewer
Rosser, Arrye (interviewer); Schnack, Erich (participant)
Project
Cuyahoga Valley National Park
Date
2-18-2022
Document Type
Oral History
Duration
67 minutes
Recommended Citation
"Lisa Cellura interview, 18 February 2022" (2022). Cleveland Regional Oral History Collection. Interview 343009.
https://engagedscholarship.csuohio.edu/crohc000/1440
Transcript
Arrye Rosser [00:00:00] Professor, how are you? I’m just fine.
Lisa Cellura [00:00:01] It’s very ironic that it’s you because yesterday I got an email from Brett Oppegaard offering me an opportunity to do another UniD in the fall.
Arrye Rosser [00:00:09] Oh, fantastic. That’s really exciting. Well, hey, I’m going to just get us jump right into this, and I’m going to just. Just for the purpose of the recording, I’m going to just overview what we’re doing. So this is the 2022 Women in Parks Oral History Project. My name is Arrye Rosser. I’m the interviewer with the National Park Service at Cuyahoga Valley National Park. And I’ll be talking to Lisa Cellura. And our tech person is Erich Schnack. We are having this conversation by phone. And the date today is April 18, 2022. How are you doing this morning, Lisa? Oh, just to talk to you.
Lisa Cellura [00:00:57] Thanks. Thanks.
Arrye Rosser [00:00:58] Well, we’re going to start out just some basic background information. I’ll give you sort of the overview of my questions. Then I was going to ask you about your career with the Sight Center, highlighting kind of the relationship between the Sight Center and Cuyahoga Valley National Park. And then we’re going to go into serve your experiences as a volunteer with the National Park Service. And then just some general reflections.
Lisa Cellura [00:01:25] Okay.
Arrye Rosser [00:01:26] Okay. So let’s start off with your background. Just tell us a little bit about yourself. Where did you grow up, things like that.
Lisa Cellura [00:01:34] I was born just outside of New York City in the Hudson Valley in New York and grew up there. Went to school for anthropology, actually, which is kind of interesting because my career ended up being in social services. But I came out to Ohio to go to graduate school at Case Western Reserve University. And after finishing graduate school and going to work for the Cleveland Sight Center, I volunteered at the Museum of Natural History, met my husband, Joe, and never left.
Arrye Rosser [00:02:03] Wonderful. And when was. When did you move to Ohio?
Lisa Cellura [00:02:08] In 1983. So I attended graduate school from ’83 to ’85, and that’s when I came out.
Arrye Rosser [00:02:16] Yeah. And what sorts of early experiences did you have that sort of pointed you in the direction of loving nature and parks?
Lisa Cellura [00:02:25] Well, I grew up with a father who was very much into nature. He was a fisherman. Earlier on, he was a hunter and trapper, but gave that up when he had little kids and couldn’t really bring home dead animals to show them. But he gave us a real good grounding. We always had bird feeders. We camped every year as children in the mountains in the Catskills, and he took me fossil hunting and fishing. And we went, you know, looking for birds and animals and beavers and so that- It was always very much part of my growing up.
Arrye Rosser [00:02:54] And early on, was there anyone special that influenced your career path?
Lisa Cellura [00:03:01] Yeah, I think there was. We had. I had a high school teacher who was an. He was an archaeologist before he was a high school teacher. And my early interest was in archeology, and so that experience. He taught our history class that year as a series of archaeological digs that were sort of virtual. Of course, there was no computers back then, but he presented us with artifacts, and that kicked off the teaching on any subject in history that he wanted to cover. And it was a really unique way to kind of immerse you in what you were doing. We also had a local, sort of like an environmental education center, only it was just sort of a nature center in our county. And there was one naturalist who really just kind of sparked a fire in all of us about being excited about nature.
Arrye Rosser [00:03:45] That’s really. That’s really cool. What a- an inventive way to teach as- I’m very impressed. How did you kind of pivot from anthropology into sort of social services? [crosstalk]
Lisa Cellura [00:04:01] Go ahead. I was always interested in both, but early on, I think I liked archaeology. I was interested in it, but I kind of wondered whether I was going to be able to make a career of that. And I think as a woman, I always thought that eventually, of course, there was going to be marriage and children. Not that I really desperately desired those things, but I just thought that’s what everybody did. And how do you be an archaeologist and raise children? And I thought that I had to have a career that was going to be more stable and more regular. And that was probably- Although things worked out, it was probably the biggest mistake of my life because that was a really mistaken idea, I think, that I had. So I was always interested in people. And I kind of decided that I would be, aside from getting my degree in anthropology, get a degree in social service or human service, and went to graduate school for that. Not that I didn’t enjoy it, but I think if I’d taken a different path or thought differently as a woman at that time, I would have looked at the greater amount of options I really had.
Arrye Rosser [00:05:03] That’s crazy. So, Lisa, we don’t know this. I hadn’t shared this with you, I don’t think, but my dad’s an archaeologist, and I was a little kid growing up on the dig.
Lisa Cellura [00:05:14] Wow, that’s interesting.
Arrye Rosser [00:05:16] It’s really funny, but I think it is, you know, you never know what life would have- There’s challenges in that field, too. So who knows? You know, you probably are on the path you- you were meant for. So tell me a little bit about how, like, how once you got into social work, how it kind of pivoted into what your career ended up being as you went into accessibility and kind of what the time frame was.
Lisa Cellura [00:05:46] Right, right. Well, I graduated from graduate School in 1985, and at the time, people said, oh, you never get a job in the newspaper. You only get a job from connections and from knowing other people and networking. And it was really strange because a few months after I graduated, I opened up the Plain Dealer, and there was an advertisement in there in the classified section for a social worker for the Cleveland Sight Center. And it sounded interesting. I was just graduated with my master’s in social work, and I went to interview and got the job and immediately absolutely fell in love with that work. It was just so uplifting and positive, and I loved that career. I loved working with people who were visually impaired and blind, helping them reach the potential that they could. And eventually, what I think it boiled down to was people were coming in who thought that life was over, and we knew that it wasn’t, and we knew they would be okay. They just didn’t know it yet. And the process of showing them how capable they were and how well they could do in any aspect of life really became something I absolutely loved. And so I never left that organization because I didn’t want to leave that field. And that was. So it started in 1985, and I retired in 2018. And it was a matter of being a social worker and then working in sort of quality assurance and designing and creating programs, and then eventually public education and development and those kinds of things.
Arrye Rosser [00:07:16] Wonderful. Tell us a little bit more about what this Cleveland Sight Center is, what kinds of services it provides, who it serves.
Lisa Cellura [00:07:26] It is an organization that was founded in 1906, and the purpose of the Sight Center is to work with people who are blind or have low vision. We have a children’s program, we have adult programs, and we have programs for everything up to seniors. And the idea is that people, being primates, are very visual creatures. We found all of our interactions with the world through vision. And when you’re born without vision or you lose vision, you really have to make a pivot from being a primarily visual learner, experiencer of the world, to being a person who experiences and reacts to that world with all of your other senses. And there are ways to do almost anything between skills and special equipment, especially now with computers and technology. But people have to learn to do that. And so our purpose was to help people become whoever they wanted to be from childhood through adulthood, wherever or whenever they lost vision, and to help them get back on whatever trajectory they wanted their life to be.
Arrye Rosser [00:08:26] And did it. Does it. Does the Sight Center just serve Cleveland or how far away do people come for the services?
Lisa Cellura [00:08:35] Primarily it serves Northeast Ohio. We do have- we did have people who came from other places, maybe because they lived in rural areas or areas that did not have an organization that provided those kinds of services, but primarily Northeast Ohio.
Arrye Rosser [00:08:49] Yeah. I was trying to think of whether there was the equivalent in Akron, but there’s- It seems like this Cleveland Sight Center is really the large, largest regional facility of its type.
Lisa Cellura [00:09:01] That’s true. Yeah. There was- There is one in Cincinnati and Toledo and Columbus. But there were many smaller organizations in smaller industrial cities like Youngstown and Akron and Elyria. But over the years, those things closed down for various reasons. And so Cleveland is primarily the- the main one in Northeast Ohio.
Arrye Rosser [00:09:22] And what was your- The last role that you had as you retired?
Lisa Cellura [00:09:28] When I finished, I was working in the development department, which involved fundraising. But my primary role was to go out into the community and teach people in the community about the abilities and skills of people who are blind and also teach people who had low vision, or seniors in general in the community about their vision, about what goes wrong with vision, about what we do to help you become rehabilitated after you have lost vision. So it was really a community education and support role.
Arrye Rosser [00:09:57] Interesting. What did you like best about the work?
Lisa Cellura [00:10:01] I think the thing I liked best about the work was watching someone come in who had had an experience or a trauma or whatever it was, who thought that life was over. And over the course of a year or maybe a year and a half for them to become out the other end of that process as capable and ability, you know, have the capabilities that they wanted and realize that their vision was always going to be an inconvenient problem, but going to define their life.
Arrye Rosser [00:10:28] Did people tend to just use the services of the Sight Center initially, perhaps as their site, they had a change in vision or were they kind of long term clients?
Lisa Cellura [00:10:42] We had some of both. Some people really chose to come get rehabilitation services and move back out into the community at large. But we also provided some services for people that we called recreation and social support, because for some people, they wanted to have a community of people with whom they did not have to explain blindness all the time. So we had support groups, we had recreational programs, and we had different kinds of social things that people could do where they could sort of step back and not have to be the ambassador of blindness wherever they went.
Arrye Rosser [00:11:16] Tell us a bit about how the partnership with Cuyahoga Valley National Park came to be.
Lisa Cellura [00:11:24] Well, it goes far as back, I think, as the ’80s, the 1980s. And the Sight Center has always been an organization that partnered with others. So we would rather not segregate and separate blind people or people who have low vision into a world of blind people. We want people to feel like they can go out and do whatever they want to do with the general population with some adaptations and some support. And so very early on, the Park Service provided some opportunities for us, along with the Metroparks and many other organizations, to help people with vision impairment and blindness get out and do what they wanted to do. And I think probably that the key thing. There were some initial things that happened before 1993, but I think in ’93, when the Towpath opened, when that whole length of Towpath was finished, the Sight Center and the Park Service realized the opportunity for bicycling for people who are blind and visually impaired. Tandem bikes are perfect because a sighted person could ride on the front, a person with vision impairment on the back. And there could not only be a shared exercise experience, but also a constant narration by that volunteer of what was going on as you passed different things along the Towpath. And so that’s probably early ’90s was probably when it really kicked off really well.
Arrye Rosser [00:12:41] That’s interesting because this is- I started in 1993, and I don’t- And I always kind of remember that the Cleveland Sight Center had a partnership with the park. But I was always a bit hazy about the details. I kind of wondering if this was- Do you remember if there was someone from the Park Service that kind of approached the Sight Center or if it’s the other way? In the ’90s, in the ’80s, there I see photos of- Maybe it was coming out of Doug Palmer as being a key person for doing- it was called Social Populations. But he was- There was a certain amount of outreach that was some of that in programming.
Lisa Cellura [00:13:29] I don’t know. Yes, his name was Doug Palmer. Doug Palmer. He was a ranger who was sort of in charge of special populations. And he had already been working, I believe, with the Special Olympics. That was one of the first things that they did. And it may- I’m not sure whether the Sight Center approached the park or the other way around, but you’re right in the very beginning, it was he who was sort of in charge of getting that partnership together because it involved not only getting bicycles that could be appropriate, finding a place to store them in the park so we wouldn’t have to transport them, and then the Sight Center bringing clients in vans to the park because public transportation by and large didn’t go to the park, and then getting volunteers, which the Sight Center and the Park Service partnered on and getting them trained. So it was sort of a multi-step process. But you’re right. I remember Doug Palmer was the ranger who was sort of the spearhead of that at the beginning.
Arrye Rosser [00:14:21] And do you remember in the ’80s what those first programs were before the tandem bikes?
Lisa Cellura [00:14:28] I don’t, I don’t actually remember. They may have done a little bit of hiking. I’m not really sure.
Arrye Rosser [00:14:35] Yeah, that’s okay. I’m not sure either. The tandem bikes. Do you have a sense of any idea of where the idea of it came from? Is that something that’s common for other- you know, just from as a recreational adaptation for people that are blind? So it would have been a natural idea that the Sight Center had or did- Was there some origin story about that?
Lisa Cellura [00:15:00] I think people who are blind and visually impaired had used tandem bikes for many, many years, you know, individually with family and friends and things like that. It wasn’t something that was an organized thing and it may have been a volunteer. And I don’t remember the name of someone who thought, wow, you know, this could work. Why can’t we, why can’t we do this? We had a person at the time, her name was Pam Buckshon and she was the head of recreation at the Sight Center. And so there was always at the Sight Center this sort of mandate to try to partner out, to try to get people out into the community rather than having segregated programs in. And I believe she probably was the person at the, the Sight Center who first had the idea for that.
Arrye Rosser [00:15:40] Oh, that’s cool. And what kind of programming were you doing in the Metroparks? I’m guessing it was primarily Cleveland Metroparks.
Lisa Cellura [00:15:51] Yes, I believe they had fishing programs early on. I think they weren’t a regular thing, but they were sort of a once in a while kind of thing where we would take people, specifically kids, and do little fishing, fishing adventures. I’m not really sure what else. They did zoo trips. I know they did zoo trips with, in the Metroparks Zoo with volunteers and things like that. I don’t really know too much about that early on as far as how they did that.
Arrye Rosser [00:16:21] And it sounds to me that what’s kind of remarkable is the tandem bike rides. Covid aside, been pretty much steadily going on since 1993ish. Seems like it’s been a very stable program.
Lisa Cellura [00:16:39] It has- it has been a very stable program because we’ve had good volunteers and the park has been cooperative about giving us a place - at the time, it was Hunt Farm - to keep the bikes so that they could be- We had a volunteer whose job it was to repair them. And for a long time, ranger. Oh, gosh, I’m forgetting his name, and I know him so well. The ranger who- What’s that?
Arrye Rosser [00:17:02] Wyndham Ratchford? No, no.
Lisa Cellura [00:17:06] He retired and moved to Maine.
Arrye Rosser [00:17:08] Oh, Paul Motts.
Lisa Cellura [00:17:09] Paul Motts. Of course. Of course. Paul Motts was really into bicycling. He and his wife and for a long time, he did the repairs on the bicycles. He would get them ready every spring and basically pull them all out and do the maintenance and do the upkeep and do all of that to get them ready, because he was already a biker and liked to do that and had that skill.
Arrye Rosser [00:17:28] Oh, that’s really cool. And how- my understanding is that generally in the warm weather season, the Sight Center has brought out a group of people every month, once a month.
Lisa Cellura [00:17:41] Yes, they have. Every month. And what we do is, because of transportation issues, one month it’s people from the east side, and one month it was people from the west side. So we could sort of cluster picking people up and bringing them down. And then one group gets on the bikes with a volunteer, a sighted volunteer, while another group goes hiking with a sighted walking volunteer. So that way we can. Since we didn’t have enough bikes for a large group of people all to be riding, we actually ended up doing it so that people could walk and people could bike. And then they eventually, probably in the 2000s, they actually purchased a stable tandem tricycle, which two people could sit on side by side. So if a person had such a disability of such nature that physically they couldn’t sit and balance on a bike, they could still do it. It was just in a more of a- It’s a tricycle, but it kind of looks like a little surrey. Only instead of having a horse draw it, you pedal it.
Arrye Rosser [00:18:34] Yeah, yeah, I’ve seen it. It’s really cool.
Lisa Cellura [00:18:37] Yeah.
Arrye Rosser [00:18:39] Have you experimented with other types of programs over the years? Well, outdoor, you know, kind of what we think of as outdoor recreation or-
Lisa Cellura [00:18:48] Yes. I don’t know if you know this, but a couple of times we sent our teenage kids to the EE Center. We had it actually a couple of times where kids, specifically a group from the Sight Center, went or four days and actually experience the EE Center standard program with adaptations for their vision loss and with special volunteers to help with that.
Arrye Rosser [00:19:09] Well, that’s fantastic. What kind of feedback did you hear from those experiences?
Lisa Cellura [00:19:16] I think people really enjoyed the fact that they could get out and get immersed in that experience and do an overnight. You know, the Sight Center has a camp out in Chardon, Ohio, so we do active programming with the camp in the summer. But at the time, that was a program that was, you know, it was. It was steeped in the national park. And it was a lot of the program centered at that time around water quality and learning about water quality. And those kids got that experience because the river was right there and they could stay overnight. And so I think people really enjoyed that opportunity and the volunteers really enjoyed it because they had to think about their curriculum in a different way to work with people who are blind.
Arrye Rosser [00:19:53] Yeah, that’s really fascinating. You think you told me that before, but it didn’t totally sink in. And what an interesting experience to have with other people who are visually impaired. So you don’t have to, like, be in your regular school environment and you’re the only one. You know, you can kind of have the whole. Everybody’s experiencing like that at the same time.
Lisa Cellura [00:20:18] Right, right.
Arrye Rosser [00:20:20] Yeah. Do you have- I was wondering about the monthly programs, whether they were always hikes or did you do, like, any thing that wasn’t recreational, that was more educational, or were there programs that the park has done at the Sight Center?
Lisa Cellura [00:20:41] Well, let me think about that for a minute. I don’t know. I don’t know that the park has come to the Sight Center. It was always more about getting clients out into the park. What we had at the Sight Center was a lot of active recreation. For a long time, we had a sailing program. So we started out by owning sailboats. People- a couple of board members gave us sailboats. And because we had two or three board members who were avid sailors, we created a sailing program where people who are visually impaired and blind learned all of the aspects of sailing a 18- to 20-foot sailboat, except, of course, steering it. And then they would go out sighted volunteers and visually impaired and blind sailors and actually sail the boats in Lake Erie. And we have a golf program. So people were going to the Metroparks golf centers and using those as a way of learning, coached golfing, where you have a coach that helps you line up your shot, but you are the golfer. It’s just that you have a sighted assistant to give you- to give you the lay of the land and the lay of the course.
Arrye Rosser [00:21:42] Cleveland Metroparks has really extensive adaptive programs, and I noticed Lake Metro Parks does too. I wonder if advocacy from the Sight Center might have influenced those over the years.
Lisa Cellura [00:21:55] Certainly possible. Certainly possible. We’ve had a lot of, not only our staff and volunteers, but our clients who advocate very well for themselves and would have asked for special things. When there was a time period where line dancing became very popular, country line dancing, urban line dancing. And it was our clients who came to us and said, it’s really not very easy for us to take a line dancing class because the teacher stands at the front of the room and says, do this. Well, what is this? So we actually were able to get. The Sight Center was actually able to get some teachers to come in and teach in a way that the person could actually follow what was going on with the hope, of course, that then they’d go out wherever dancing was taking place, know the steps.
Arrye Rosser [00:22:35] Oh, very cool.
Lisa Cellura [00:22:36] Yeah.
Arrye Rosser [00:22:37] For the monthly, like, tandem bike programs, I wondered of whether the same participants would come over and over and over again or if people would sort of, like, try it a few times. And then there was turnover. I was just curious about, like, what the pattern of participation was.
Lisa Cellura [00:23:00] I think there was a base of people who were the same all the time, but people would come and go because generally, you know, in our population, people were losing vision all the time. So you might have somebody who had been visually impaired for 30 years, but someone else just came in because there was a car accident or they had diabetes and lost their vision. And so there was a steady base of people, but then there were people who trickled in and out, which is actually very helpful because newly blinded or newly visually impaired people, what they need most is to see successful, competent blind people living in the world. And so those people who maybe been around 20 years are a really good role model for the people who are new.
Arrye Rosser [00:23:39] And yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Did you have any feedback? I know you’ve got longtime friends that are clients also. What are some of the stories or the impacts from or just what people say about participating in the programs in the national park? What have they gotten out of it?
Lisa Cellura [00:24:01] I think that they really, that people really enjoy the immersion in a totally different environment, especially since many, not all, but many of our clients are from the city of Cleveland, the urban environment. And I’ll just give you one example of something that happened with me. I was volunteering with the monthly hike and bike program at one point, and I was doing sighted guide, helping a person walk down the Towpath. And we went to down the towpath and we were just entering into the beaver marsh. And the person said to me, what’s that smell? What’s that smell? And I had never even paid attention to the fact that when you’re out over the water in the Beaver Marsh, the water and the whole environment smells differently than it does when you’re in the woods. And so that person was kind of waking up to that whole environmental change. But so did I, because I’m so visual as a sighted person, it never occurred to me to notice that it smells different when you’re over the water than it does when you’re in the woods. So there’s that whole waking up of senses and the whole idea of learning something so new and being in such a different place. That’s really a positive experience.
Arrye Rosser [00:25:07] Did you- what about, like, some of the things that I imagine, quite a few of the volunteers might have stayed with the program over, over a long time. Did you- do you remember any kinds of feedback that you heard from them?
Lisa Cellura [00:25:23] They really enjoyed, like I said before, they really enjoyed having to think about what they were doing differently and really paying attention. Because a person who is visually impaired, for example, may ask you, what’s that bird sound? What’s that bird sound? What’s that bird sound? And you’re not even really aware that there’s five different birds singing. And so they really enjoyed talking to people and they really enjoyed giving somebody access to something that they normally would be denied access to because of just transportation issues or not having somebody with them who can kind of guide them along. And many of the volunteers stayed with the active with the program for many years.
Arrye Rosser [00:25:57] Do you know if there’s this introduction to these types of park experiences, whether that became kind of hobbyist for people who were participants?
Lisa Cellura [00:26:10] That’s a good question. I don’t really know that because I’ve left the Sight Center. I retired five years ago. And so I don’t know. I guess I can say from my own experience that friends of mine have endured and kept those things going. The issue for people with visual impairment without a support system is the transportation. And the Metroparks are a little more accessible than the national park. But if you live in Cleveland, there really isn’t any physical way to get to the national park because you’re crossing a county boundary or you’re crossing into boundaries where buses usually don’t go. But I think, yes, I think people do keep up as hobbies, things they started in some of those programs.
Arrye Rosser [00:26:50] I wonder if Uber or similar ride services are changing things for people. I guess there’s always been taxis, but it’s expensive.
Lisa Cellura [00:27:00] Yeah. Yeah. I think Uber has changed things for people who are blind and visually impaired in some ways. Yes. I know that as I was leaving the Sight Center five years ago, and Uber was really kind of a rising thing, people were saying that it was easier, you know, it wasn’t all that easy to get a taxi in Cleveland if you weren’t right downtown. But an Uber, you can.
Arrye Rosser [00:27:19] Yeah. What were some of the other popular activities that were, you know, just some of the other field trips that people used to really enjoy doing. You mentioned the line dancing, but I don’t know if there was any other things.
Lisa Cellura [00:27:33] Oh, we. Yeah, we had a whole- We had- Let’s see, we had the golf program. We had the tandem biking and hiking program. We have a wonderful program in court- we had a wonderful program in cooperation with Fieldstone Farm Riding Center. Our children, and sometimes our teens would go and actually do therapeutic horseback riding, because, first of all, it’s an incredibly multisensory experience. Smelling a horse, feeling a horse. But also, if you’re a child who’s learning how to navigate the world as a blind person sitting on top of a horse, think of all the muscles that have to shift and move and work in order to stay balanced on the back of a horse. And so that’s a really neat thing. And that program’s been going on for many, many years. They had accessible tours at the art museum various times, and also at the Natural History Museum. And then Joe and I actually created a little thing that we were really proud of. In 2010, Joe and I, my husband, went through the Ohio Certified Volunteer Naturalist Course, which is an Ohio State University extension program where we learn how to be assistant naturalists in various settings. But for our final assignment, we decided to create an education program specifically for people who are blind and visually impaired. And it was about bat ecology, because that year was the year of the bat internationally. So we created a program to teach people about bats that was accessible to blind people, including a game and braille elements and tactile elements. And we succeeded so well with that. And the people who we brought it to loved it so much that we then created one on bird migration with tactile maps and tactile models of birds that were migratory and non-migratory and we were able to bring those to the park for the clients as they were doing the hiking and biking. But then we were also able to bring them out to the support groups that the Sight Center ran that were meeting in various senior centers. So that was really fun. Yeah, it was a really fun thing to do. And it actually kind of got people involved in nature in a remote way.
Arrye Rosser [00:29:33] Yeah, yeah, I can imagine that- that, you know, there’s just whole categories of information that perhaps people don’t get to experience because it hasn’t been translated into something that’s tactile or.
Lisa Cellura [00:29:48] Yeah, yeah, I forgot one, too. The other thing that was really neat was, I don’t know if you realize that the Underground Railroad program that Pam did for many, many years, she, you know, was the program that started out at Howe Meadow, and people hiked two and a half miles while they were told all different perspectives and stories about the Underground Railroad. We actually brought that to the Sight Center at one point. We had the auditorium in the Sight Center was set up like a theater, and the volunteers were all given some introductory information about how to make things audible and tactile for people with blindness and low vision. And then we did the Underground Railroad program right there at the Sight Center, which was really fun.
Arrye Rosser [00:30:27] I think I remember seeing photos of that, and that was the one in my mind when I asked you about if there was any programs that went to the Sight Center. I was trying to remember if that’s what it was.
Lisa Cellura [00:30:37] Yeah, I had forgotten about that one. And actually, the fun thing was we took two of the people who were at the Sight Center as staff members who worked in the recreation program, and we actually gave them a lines to learn, and they were in the program. So people the Sight Center clients knew really well got to play in there. Desmond Kennedy was one of them. He was one of our recreational specialists who has since moved on, and now he does recreation specialist work at the VA. But he portrayed one of the characters, and so it was kind of a fun partnership.
Arrye Rosser [00:31:07] Wonderful. What are some- I wondered, what are some of the biggest improvements you’ve seen in accessibility for people with visual impairments? You know, you’ve kind of, you know, you started your career after the ADA went into place, but probably about the time when a lot of compliance was starting to kick in.
Lisa Cellura [00:31:29] That’s right.
Arrye Rosser [00:31:30] If you sort of- What your perspective on is how community organizations might have changed over time.
Lisa Cellura [00:31:40] Right. I think probably the most- the most dramatic, explosive thing that changed for people with visual impairment was the technologies available to give them access to things, which it’s not so much a regulatory thing as it’s just a- here is something I can access. You know, before anything you wanted to read, if you were out at a park, for instance, anything you wanted to read had to be read to you, or it had to be put into braille or into an auditory form. And now somebody with a handheld cell phone can point it at a block of text, take a picture of it, and have their screen reader read that to them without any adaptation other than that. And so that’s huge. It means that people can do a whole lot more completely independently than they could, and so a lot more is accessible. The only thing it hasn’t changed is the transportation issue, which is one of the major barriers for people.
Arrye Rosser [00:32:35] Yeah. Are there other types of barriers that are maybe more- more subtle, like attitudinal barriers, things like that?
Lisa Cellura [00:32:47] Oh, for sure, for sure. There’s still a lot of, I think, attitude that people who are visually impaired or blind are either helpless folks that we must pity and take care of, or somehow magical people who have powers and senses that we don’t have. And neither one is true, of course, but getting people to understand that people who are visually impaired or blind just are like them. We just need to adapt a few things or we just need to do things a little differently. That’s something that takes constant- and continuing education and support.
Arrye Rosser [00:33:22] Yeah. What sort of- I wondered, just on a kind of random thing, if there’s any sort of funny stories that you had of folks who are blind coming into the national park and, you know, having a good laugh about whatever was going on.
Lisa Cellura [00:33:37] Oh, yeah, all the time. All the time. I remember, you know, once volunteering the same actual trip where we had these experience about, you know, what the park smelled like was. I consider myself to be a pretty savvy birder. I’ve been birding for 30 years, and I think, you know, I’ve got it all together. And I know my bird calls. And I walked down the path with one of my friends from the Sight Center, who’s a totally blind person who loves birds, but lives right in downtown Cleveland on Ansel Road. And she kept asking me what bird call this and that was. And she was- We were laughing because I thought I was so good at bird calls. And she was- She was hearing things that I had never even paid attention to. And the fact that four times she asked me what a bird call was, and all four times it was a titmouse, because titmouse sound like everything. It never even occurred to me that she was paying that much attention to how those things were different. And it was just kind of a funny thing that she was picking up more than I was. Just silly kinds of things that you don’t realize that you’re getting and it’s always kind of laughing. The other thing that I did for the Sight Center was I paid attention to and I had a class that I used to give that was about what to do when you meet a blind person and how little things that we do as a sighted person can be annoying and embarrassing and sometimes really frustrating for blind people. And one of them is about the fact that when you’re with a person who’s visually impaired or blind, you’ve got to tell them what’s going on. Because if they suddenly hear everybody laughing and something happened that was not auditory, they’re left out of it. And so we constantly had little laughing, little jokes and little things about the fact that I had forgotten to say something or I would tell somebody to go left when they should have gone right. Well, you know, your other right. And just those little things that people laugh about together that are no different for a person who’s blind than it is for a person who’s sighted.
Arrye Rosser [00:35:30] Yeah, we all have that up the-
Lisa Cellura [00:35:32] Right, right, of course, of course.
Arrye Rosser [00:35:37] Could you talk a bit about how you got started volunteering for Cuyahoga Valley National Park? Was it the relationship with- through the tandem bike program or was there something else that connected you with the park?
Lisa Cellura [00:35:50] Oh, actually, not at all. My relationship was completely separate. Actually, what happened was my husband and I had been volunteering at the Museum of Natural History. We met there and we fell in love there in the basement in the archaeology laboratory. And in 1983, for a variety of financial institutions, staffing reasons, the Saturday morning program where volunteers worked in the lab was ended. And Joe and I really loved volunteering. So we simply cold called the national park and said, hey, we’ve, we’ve got some volunteer time and we don’t have a volunteer place. What do you got? And the park was just opening the canal lock that they had just restored. And they said, wow, we need people to come and get dressed up in old fashioned costumes and demonstrate this lock. And so we said, okay. And we got trained. Judy Foltz and Debbie Ayers at the time were in charge and we got trained and we got involved in doing the canal lock that way. And I think in part the relationship that I had with the park sort of helped create some of those things that happened with the Sight Center, because I was there all the time and I was in the park all the time. And there was just conversations that got going over cubicles and over our desks and things like that. But we started with canal lock demonstrations and we moved on to acting. I think if anybody had asked. Asked me before 1993 if I would ever get up in front of a group of people and act, I would have said they were absolutely crazy. But Pam, who was new then, had all kinds of ideas about how to make history live through drama and acting and interpretation in third and first person. And we got involved with her. And so that kind of just went from there. And then after 2010 when we did our Ohio Certified Volunteer Naturalist program, then we got involved in the Wildlife Watchers and Citizen Science and monitoring wildlife and that sort of thing.
Arrye Rosser [00:37:44] You know, it’s interesting because I didn’t realize that you were, you know, going back that far in the volunteer program. Like, I know you volunteered here for a while. So if I started in ’93, that was the year the Towpath opened.
Lisa Cellura [00:37:58] Right.
Arrye Rosser [00:37:58] Started a little before that, because Canal Exploration Center, or what’s now Canal Exploration Center, was Canal Visitor Center. That was just a little bit. Was that 1990 somewhere in that neighborhood?
Lisa Cellura [00:38:11] It was, but the lock was restored. The lock actually opened and they were. And they restored it and set up the interpretation program in the summer of ’93.
Arrye Rosser [00:38:21] Oh, so it kind of came on board about the time the Towpath path reopened, not Visitor Center opened.
Lisa Cellura [00:38:29] Right, right.
Arrye Rosser [00:38:31] Oh, that’s really interesting. I never knew that little detail. I’ve seen photos of it, but never quite put the whole thing together. So was- And Pam was Pam Thorne back then, but she was Pam Machuga now. She would have- Was she involved in some of those lock demonstrations? Is that how you guys met?
Lisa Cellura [00:38:52] No, actually she wasn’t. I mean, all rangers- Yeah, a lot of rangers rotated in and did, you know, the way we did it was there was an assigned ranger and the first summer it was poor Martin Gutelius who had to give every single demonstration, every single time they did them. But the following year they started rotating the rangers out. And so different rangers would be the ranger in charge of that demonstration day. And Pam rotated through there, as did the other ones. And then eventually they wanted the volunteers to be able to give narration. And so I learned to do that and became one of those. And I think we just got hooked up with Pam through that. The first thing she did, I think, was one of the Underground Railroad programs. That was just a simple little program that was done down at Stanford, I think, or maybe Boston. I can’t- Or, yeah, it was- It was in Boston, but that’s how we met her, I think, probably through doing the demos.
Arrye Rosser [00:39:45] What was. When- when was those first acting. I could ask Pam, too. But what do you remember about the first- about the timing of those first acting experiences?
Lisa Cellura [00:39:57] It was probably. Yeah, it was probably a maybe- maybe if that. Two years after we started with the park. So probably. And I want to say maybe ’95, but you could ask Pam to be sure.
Arrye Rosser [00:40:07] Yeah, that sounds about- Sounds about right to me, too. Let’s see. Excuse me, was there any other- Do you want to say anything about your volunteering with Resource Management?
Lisa Cellura [00:40:22] Oh, yeah, that’s- Yeah, that’s brand new. My husband and I have been doing well for years. We’ve done Dwight Chaucer’s bird census in the spring, which was just a way to count what kinds of species there are of birds and where they are. But really recently, maybe three or four years ago, we started doing bat monitoring, which was simple. It’s called emergence survey, where you don’t actually touch the bats. We just get to sit down in a chair in front of a place where bats live. And when it gets dark, they start flooding out of the, wherever it is. And we click and count them. We do it once right before they start to have babies that are going to be, you know, before the babies fly. So we get in the sense of how many adults are there. And then a month later, when the babies should be flying, we do the whole thing again, hoping that our count is going to about double bubble. The interesting thing about that was that the first time we got involved in our bat monitoring survey was about 2004, 2005. And that was before White Nose syndrome, which is the fungal disease that has affected so many populations of bats. It was before it got to Cuyahoga Valley National Park. So we had massive counts of bats in places like Howe Meadow and Kendall and a few other places. And then 2006 hit, which was- 2006 was the year that- Or was it 2006 was the year it started, whatever. The year that it got to the park, which- And I can’t remember what exact year that was, we saw- We actually saw that number plummet from one year to the next when the White Nose syndrome affected the park population. And then more recently, we’ve been involved in amphibian surveys, which are just going on this year for the first time. And what we’re doing there is counting. What is the mortality rate or how many amphibians that are trying to cross park roads to get to their vernal pools to breed, how many of them are dying on the road because they’re being hit by cars. And then the park will make decisions about what they do about that.
Arrye Rosser [00:42:18] Lisa, I’m just struck listening to you about how you’ve been one of the first volunteers in so many of these startup kinds of initiatives or early on you don’t have people like you- you’ve been one of those founding volunteers as certain programs have started up. It must give you kind of an interesting perspective on the park.
Lisa Cellura [00:42:42] Oh, it is, it is one of my favorite things. And Joe and I, we were involved in the lock demonstrations for 15 years before we moved on from that. You know, eventually we kind of said, well, let’s move to something else. But it was really interesting because the first, oh, I would say about eight or nine years of doing lock demonstrations, it was a wonderful, immersive, explosive experience because the lock filled and the lock emptied and there was a roaring of water and there was water pouring in. But eventually the lock, like any lock would even back then, started to deteriorate and, and, and there was less and less water and there was less and less water in the canal. And of course now because they removed the Route 82 dam, that that water is even less, although they’re building a pump. So just seeing things rise and then fall and then other things rise has been amazing for both of us.
Arrye Rosser [00:43:31] Yeah. I wonder. I think being a long-term employee, I feel the same thing, like the impact of time and changes over time, it’s just very striking. What are some of the other things that you just have noticed in the park? Kind of just reflecting back a little bit of things that you’ve seen. Big differences.
Lisa Cellura [00:43:56] Well, yeah, one of the biggest ones, and I have to say, unfortunately it’s not a particularly positive one, is that the support that the National Park Service overall, nationally gives to its parks has declined. And give you an example of that. When we started back in the early ’90s, the rangers had a really neat idea for a program called Shadows of the Past where we were going to walk around Kendall Lake and there was going to be stories of early people who had lived in the park, of ghost stories, but not really spooky. And that first year, Joe and I portrayed a couple called Stephen and Mehitable Frazee who lived in the northern part of the park. But other than us, all of the actors in that program were full-time rangers in the park. So there was probably eight or nine other people. So to support that program took all the volunteers that led the guides that led the hikes and carried the lanterns, and of course, all of those rangers. And over time, the park, because of funding, has been less and less and less able to support those kinds of things. So eventually, when Pam did the Shadows of the Past, the last time we did it, she was the only ranger who worked that program. And all of the actors had to be volunteers. And that’s been true of a lot of things, that there were lots and lots and lots of professional rangers supporting the park and that over time that’s declined. And that’s sad to see.
Arrye Rosser [00:45:24] Yeah, it’s amazing because it feels like we still do a lot, but our staff has gone down and it’ll be interesting to see what happens because Covid, we’ve lost a lot of volunteers, so we’re really going to have to rebuild those programs. But we’ve been so blessed with the support from the community we’re able to do. I think that’s just an observation I’ve had, is that rangers have gone from being like doing certain things sometimes to sort of managing certain things.
Lisa Cellura [00:45:59] Yes, that’s very true. If you look at a schedule of events from 20 years ago, they would be, you know, 10 pages of ranger-led programs. And if you look at the park guide now, it has good programs, but there’s far less of them.
Arrye Rosser [00:46:14] Yeah, we’ve gone away. We’ve gone to a lot more informal programming and sort of the drop and pop up kind of things than formal programming. And some of it’s just societal changes too. You know, people don’t like to commit to a certain time. So you’re a little better off just sort of having something there over a period that they can come in and out of.
Lisa Cellura [00:46:36] Yeah, yeah. The other thing that was kind of fun to watch, you know, when we started volunteering for the park, I was 32 and I’m now almost 61. And it’s just a course of natural time. When we first started with the park, because they had just opened the towpath and the park was really building, they had developed the Canal Visitor Center and then Hunt Farm came on board. And then they were doing all of this initial development. All of the rangers or many of them were very young, they were single, they didn’t have commitments yet, they didn’t have children yet. And so they were constantly coming to each other’s programs for moral support and just, you know, constantly doing all kinds of things. Well, over time they got married and they had children and their children grew up. And so it was just interesting to watch that. You know, Pam Machuga went from being the expecting range of on one of our programs, you know, she was expecting a baby and later on, years later, her daughter was one of the characters in the Underground Railroad as a teenager. So that was kind of fun to watch as well. That whole life cycle of the ranger staff.
Arrye Rosser [00:47:39] Can you talk a little bit about just the work that we did in 2021 on the Descriptathon?
Lisa Cellura [00:47:46] Oh, that was really fun. It was really fun. Yeah. One of the big things for people who are blind and visually impaired is that when they come to a place, the written information is very often inaccessible to them and it can be made accessible. But basically that’s a hard job and you have to do a lot of work and it loses a lot because the pictures and the photos and the graphics in a piece of equipment or piece of writing are not accessible to them. The descriptathon, and I’m not even sure who invented it, we went through all that when we did the descriptathon. But what it did was it took that brochure that every park service park has, which they sort of look all the same. They have six panels or eight panels and they have the name of the park on the front. But they’re very, very artistic and very graphic in what they show you and they’re very hard to make accessible. So you can make the text accessible, but not the pictures and the feeling and the artwork. And so this UniD product is an app that goes on a phone and if it has been a UniD-ied, the park brochure then is available not only for the text to be read, but for all of the non text parts of it to be described. So what we did was we spent three days, people from the park, blind people, people who were chosen for various skills, and we looked through that brochure that the park has and said what needs to be described? What order do we describe it in? How do we describe it so that once it’s done, a blind person can go on the app, click on the Cuyahoga Valley National Park brochure and have that entire brochure experience in spoken voice that makes sense?
Arrye Rosser [00:49:29] Yeah. And I think I found it also just a very interesting experience. You may think it would be something. They sort of described it to us like we could get it all done and it in- in those three-day workshop. And in the end we probably worked on it before in combination of the stuff we had to do pre work and the stuff we did post work. It was about a two month project and I felt like I just learned a tremendous amount as well because a lot of it we’ve just redone the unit, what the Park Service calls the unigrid brochure. And so I was, was familiar because I was, I managed that project with what the thinking was behind it. And that was interesting to sort of like really try to think about, not just describing, really describing like intentionality a little bit, particularly with the map and stuff like that, of how to make sense of the whole thing without getting lost in all of the minutiae of the details, but having the details be provided context, you know, that I think that was just really interesting. And it’s interesting I was interested to hear that people, in some things, people want a lot of detail and sometimes they want to be able to skim. You have to kind of be able to work both ways too.
Lisa Cellura [00:50:57] Yes, yes. I think the main, the biggest value or probably the biggest thing that I like about the whole UniD process was that blind people themselves are always on the team. It’s not we’re going to do this for you, it’s we’re going to do this with you. And the fact that everything that we described had to be run through a blind user meant that those people got to tell us what we might have missed or whether something was useful to them rather than just whether we did what we thought was going to be working.
Arrye Rosser [00:51:28] I know it was so fascinating, especially because, you know, you’re starting off with a product that the blind person cannot see. So you’re, they’re having to learn what the content is as you’re working and you’re kind of querying, you know, does it make sense? You know, you’re kind of honing in on, on it together of what’s extraneous information and what is useful. One of the biggest things that I learned out of that, you know, we had a blind person on our team, but then we were also interfacing in the workshop with the folks on other teams as well. And I, I learned how much the ability to like look at the brochure ahead of time really meant that the person who had visual impairments or was blind could participate in trip planning decisions and other very much a passive kind of at the mercy of other people’s interests and or suggestions or ideas. And that really was a very empowering thing to be a full participant in. Not just like the pre-trip planning, but once you know, you were there. That person could make suggestions like, hey, you know, we could, you know, maybe we could do this instead. It’s raining, or whatever it is. You know, they had that knowledge of the park to think of what options were.
Lisa Cellura [00:52:56] Yes, absolutely. Yeah, that’s really important.
Arrye Rosser [00:52:58] Yeah. But looking back on all the different things you’ve done as a volunteer, what do you think are some of the areas you’ve made the biggest impact?
Lisa Cellura [00:53:08] Wow, that’s a good question. That’s a very good question. I’ve- I’ve thought about that sometimes myself. I think, especially since I- since I left the Sight Center and I have been only working really with the park. You know, I’ve thought to myself, well, I gave my career to people, you know, working with people. And now I’m sort of trying to give my after career time to nature. But really it isn’t because a lot of what we do in our work as volunteers is reacting to people. One of the things we do is the Wildlife Watcher program, where we set up a table of skulls and pelts and information in a place where something important is happening in the park. And one day we were at the Eagle’s Nest, my husband and I, and we don’t- I don’t have children. In the end- Remember at the beginning I told you I always thought there was going to be marriage and children? Well, there was marriage, but there weren’t children. That was our choice. And we went on Mother’s Day because we thought, well, all the other people, you know, all the other volunteers have families and they have mothers or they are mothers. And so we went out to the Eagle’s Nest, and we were there with our little table, and this family came by and the mother and the two kids and the father were all there. And we asked them, you know, if they wanted to look in the scope and look at the equipment and they got to see the Eagle’s Nest. And the mother had said that they asked her what she wanted to do for Mother’s Day, and she said she wanted to go and try to see an eagle. She’d never seen an eagle. And she put her eye up to the scope that we had set up and she burst into tears because she’d never seen an eagle. And I think if there’s an impact of our volunteering, it’s that. It’s that we make it possible for somebody to do that, to see something for the first time, to understand something for the first time, to be in a place that might not be accessible to them otherwise. So am I really giving my senior years to nature? Maybe. But I may be still giving it to people, too, and that’s okay.
Arrye Rosser [00:55:01] I know. Well, you know, nature needs people to support it.
Lisa Cellura [00:55:07] Right, right.
Arrye Rosser [00:55:09] To be stewards. Unfortunately, it’s kind of at the mercy of human decision making, isn’t it?
Lisa Cellura [00:55:15] Yeah, it is. It is. Yeah.
Arrye Rosser [00:55:17] Yeah. How do you think volunteering has impacted you because you’ve done it for so many years? I’m curious, like, its impact and just what keeps you coming back for so long?
Lisa Cellura [00:55:27] Oh, wow. You know, it’s a combination of things we do. We volunteer in areas that we love. We met volunteering so. Well, first of all, let me say volunteering gave me my husband, so I can’t complain about that. You know, we met in a volunteer situation, which not only gave us each other, but because we met doing something we both loved. Our entire married life, which now is going on 32 years, is based on shared volunteer projects, so that’s a big thing. But besides that, we’ve just been able to meet so many different people. And learn about so many different things and. And, you know, and adventure in so many different ways. We’re both lifelong learners. We just love to learn new things. And so the volunteering experiences we’ve had and continue to have let us keep doing that.
Arrye Rosser [00:56:14] Yeah. You know, it’s funny because I’m very similar personality type, and I wonder if just the variety that’s a kind of the belly, you know, has given you a lot of depth of being able to choose to do something different and keep staying with the park.
Lisa Cellura [00:56:34] That’s very true. Yeah. I mean, the acting thing that we do is. Is very different. Very different than going out in 50 degrees and pouring rain and counting salamanders and unfortunately, watching some of them get hit by cars, and there’s nothing we can do about it. But they’re very different things the park offers people. If you’re focused on people, you can go there. If you’re focused on being all by yourself out in nature, counting something and not having other people around you, you can go there. There’s just a lot to offer in the park. So we volunteer for, obviously, we’re Metroparks volunteers because that’s how we do Lights Out Cleveland. And we’re museum volunteers because we’re working there still after all of those years having left the museum. When we got started working with Lights Out Cleveland, we went back to the museum because we on Wednesdays work in the ornithology laboratory processing the birds that window strike and so, you know, we’ve always been with the park. Ever since we started. We have stayed with the park because there’s just so many opportunities there.
Arrye Rosser [00:57:32] What are you most proud of accomplishing through your work? You sort of hinted that on the impact, but you’ve been at the forefront of some things. I was kind of curious if you reflect on that or if there’s just other things that come to mind.
Lisa Cellura [00:57:47] Well, there’s lots of things. I think one of the things. One of the highlights for my husband and I, which was a complete surprise, was in 2011, after we finished creating our program on bat ecology for people who are blind and visually impaired to teach about bat ecology and White Nose syndrome and the value of bats in the community. The ranger, Mike Cosmos, who worked with us in Wildlife Watchers, nominated us for a Hartzog Award, and we won the regional award because of that program that we had created to make the park more accessible. And that was just- It was just so- It meant that somebody had heard, you know, somebody had recognized what we did and when. That’s not the most important thing, but it’s pretty cool. That Hartzog Award is still on our- on our buffet in the dining room.
Arrye Rosser [00:58:32] Oh, congratulations on that. And it’s funny because I still work with Mike Cosmos. He’s at Stan here. We’re depressing stuff together. He’s lovely.
Lisa Cellura [00:58:44] Yes. Yes. We really liked working with him and Paul and everything. So. Yeah.
Arrye Rosser [00:58:49] What do you feel like you’re most passionate about? How have your passions sort of changed or have they over time?
Lisa Cellura [00:58:58] Oh, you know, I have a lot of energy. Also have a lot of anxiety. But that’s, you know, sometimes that can be a good thing. I don’t know. That’s a good question. I love to keep learning. I think that’s my thing. I think of overall, my personality is I’m a hunter. Not for people. I mean, not the way you generally think. But I’m constantly trying to seek information and, you know, all of the things that we’ve done for volunteering helps us do that, and then helping other people get that information in a way that’s accessible and fun. I think those are two things that I really love.
Arrye Rosser [00:59:29] Have you- who inspires you in the kind of work that you do or what types of things make you hopeful? It’s easy to get depressed when you throw yourself into a lot of information. I’m the same person. I’m similar too. You know, it’s kind of overwhelming. There’s a lot of negative things. But what- what inspires you and makes you hopeful.
Lisa Cellura [00:59:51] Oh, I think small projects. I think the interesting thing is it would be easy when you’re looking at all of this, what’s going- going on environmentally, to think that, you know, ultimately there’s no hope. We’ve screwed up the world so badly we can’t possibly get it back. But when you look at small local projects, you can see that overall, people do have the ability to make those changes and to make the difference. And there’s really, you know, there are some people whose, whose, I think, destiny is to work on that global scale. That’s not mine. I’m very- I’m perfectly comfortable with my own insignificance. But what we can do on a local level can add information, research a basis for what they’re doing at that bigger level. And I’m perfectly okay with that.
Arrye Rosser [01:00:37] I hear you, totally on that one. What about Cuyahoga Valley stays with you on a personal level.
Lisa Cellura [01:00:47] It’s just- it’s just a nice place to, you know. Oh, gosh, how do I say that? It’s just a place where I feel comfortable and at ease. And it’s wonderful that in between two great big cities, we’ve been able to keep that experience for people alive.
Arrye Rosser [01:01:10] It is really this little miracle between Akron and Cleveland.
Lisa Cellura [01:01:15] Yeah, yeah, yeah, it is. It is.
Arrye Rosser [01:01:18] Well, Lisa, it’s been such a pleasure. I wonder if you had just any other things that you would like to share. Is there anything I missed? I’m done with my questions.
Lisa Cellura [01:01:27] Oh, well, thank you. No, I- I’m just interested in what is going to happen to all of this information. I hope I don’t end up on Twitter.
Arrye Rosser [01:01:38] Well, you might, but it would be in a minimum, in a minimal way.
Lisa Cellura [01:01:42] Okay, well, that’s good.
Arrye Rosser [01:01:45] We keep it positive, Lisa. We- So what the project is doing is we’re taking these profiles and turning them into online shared content stories. And that’s going to take us a while. I kind of want to dampen everybody’s hopes of our productivity of turning things around. We’re sort of in a gathering mode, and then we will be more in a writing mode. So we create online stories, basically, that shared content kind of works where we’re tagging it within the National Park Service system, and then it can populate in on other- in other shared places in the Park Service. So it doesn’t just live like on Cuyahoga Valley National Park’s website. But if we were talking about accessibility or something, that story might appear on an accessibility page within the giant ecosystem that is the Park Service’s website. So we’re- we’re basically taking the park through sort of- of curating our stories. We’re pushing the park out. This particular project is around women and leadership and at the community level. And so I imagine some of that might go out into women’s stories. But you touch on a lot of different things we may also pull. We’re still kind of, since we’re gathering, we don’t totally know what we’re going to get. We know the subjects, we’re talking about what we don’t really know. So we’re learning and trying to contextualize the things as we go. And then it might be that some quotes or pieces end up in something else that we’re doing. So we’re basically building the way that we spent quite a few years creating the new Visitor Center. We’re basically building this whole virtual visitor center of all the stories, all this theme stuff. We’re rehabbing the whole website for the Park Service, part of that for our park. And part of that’s also really nailing accessibility. As well as we’re refreshing web pages, we’re really paying attention to the things that make the web page really accessible. You know, we’re not sort of compliant otherwise, but I don’t think we’re always great in how we structured information. So I think this is. It’s kind of the next revolution. And we’ve done a lot of exhibit work and things like that. This is sort of the next frontier. And then we use social media essentially to promote what we’ve done on the web. And sometimes Erich, he’s doing the recording today, he’s been just highlighting the stories of women in leadership. We do it during Women’s History Month, but we also just do it in other theme times too. So we plan out. We have a team that plans out the content for all of our social media channels and works on our, where we’re going to put our efforts on web content work and things like that. And we. And kind of mix all this. This stuff into those things. So who knows? You know, we have Erin, who you met last year. She identified like all the different site, all the different accessibility related theme months and days and stuff like that within the year. So you know, if we’re doing something about- I’m not remembering offhand if there’s sort of like a, you know, a visual impairment awareness day or something like that, but we do. That would be opportunities where we might get the story. I really wanted to curate the story of how the Sight Center how we got involved Sight Center. And that was kind of my main interest in talking to you. But I’m now just as curious as you and Joe being kind of these original volunteers. Really fascinating, too. You guys are in everything. So I just-
Lisa Cellura [01:05:49] Yeah, we’ve done everything we’ve done, we’ve done together that, you know, we’re kind of an unusual couple in that way. Lots of couples have some interest together and some that they- that they don’t. And we don’t. We’re. We’re kind of joined at the hip, and it’s all about the volunteering and birding and hiking and stuff like that.
Arrye Rosser [01:06:04] Oh, I know. It’s wonderful. Well, thank you, Lisa, so much for your time today and for all your service to the park. You know, you’re an inspiration to me, and- and I’m really glad to get to know you, and I’m glad we had a chance to kind of capture your thoughts today and hopefully- And when we go to do writing about you, we could. We’ll circle back. You’ll see whatever we’re putting out, so it won’t be any surprises.
Lisa Cellura [01:06:32] Okay, thanks so much.
Arrye Rosser [01:06:33] It’s nice to talk to you today. Take care.
Lisa Cellura [01:06:35] Okay, you too.
Arrye Rosser [01:06:36] Bye.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.
