Lotta S. Rand | |
---|---|
Born | August 26, 1868 Lynn, Massachusetts |
Died | December 3, 1956 (aged 88) |
Occupation(s) | Social worker, charity executive |
Lotta Stetson Rand (August 26, 1868[1] – December 3, 1956) was an American social worker and an executive at the American Foundation for the Blind.
Rand was born in Lynn, Massachusetts,[1] the daughter of John Howard Rand and Julia Dodd Spinney Rand.
Rand was a social worker in Lynn as a young woman. She became a deputy superintendent with the Massachusetts Commission for the Blind beginning in 1908.[2] She was a delegate to the International Conference for the Blind, held in London in 1914.[3] She spent three months with the American Red Cross in Halifax in 1918, assigned to report on conditions for blinded victims of the Halifax Explosion.[4][5] Later in 1918 she went to France to work with the Red Cross in the care of American soldiers blinded in World War I.[1][6]
In the early 1920s, Rand was executive secretary of the Harvard Graduate School of Education Course in Education of the Blind, an extension program.[7][8][9] In the 1920s and 1930s she was associate director of the American Foundation for the Blind, based in New York.[10][11] As AFB field representative,[12][13] she toured in the United States speaking to community groups and raising funds.[14][15][16] She often spoke on issues affecting people who became blind in adulthood.[10][12]
Rand also made advance arrangements and accompanied some of Helen Keller's speaking engagements in the 1930s.[17][18] Rand and Keller met as early as 1908, when Keller and Anne Sullivan Macy visited a handicraft shop in Manchester, Massachusetts, run by the Massachusetts Commission for the Blind, Rand was also on hand, as a commission superintendent.[19]