Fort Towson

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.

Early life and education

Rand was born in Lynn, Massachusetts,^[1] the daughter of John Howard Rand and Julia Dodd Spinney Rand.

Career

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]

Publications

• Agencies for the blind in America: Directory of activities for the blind in the United States and Canada (1926, compiled by Rand)^[20]

Personal life

Rand died in 1956, at the age of 88.^[7][21]

References