“This is like the camp you see in Disney movies,” Enchanted Hills Napa director Jamey Gump said July 16 as he welcomed a visitor to his bustling camp, arranged on the rugged slopes of Mount Veeder.

He had a point.

The views from the ridgeline, looking out over Napa Valley, are spectacular. Enchanted Hills’ wood cabins and common buildings — many of them built after the Nuns Fire took out about half the campus in 2017 — are rustic but spiffy. There is a working garden, a meditation room and boats. A horseback riding lesson was in progress, kids saddled up or waiting their turn at the stables.

Gump could see almost none of it. He has a condition that makes his eyes ultra-sensitive to light, and even wearing three pairs of stacked sunglasses he can make out only the broad outlines of people he’s speaking to.

Gump was once a camper at Enchanted Hills, a 76-year-old refuge for blind and low-vision people that is an increasing rarity. Its leaders, at the San Francisco-based nonprofit LightHouse for the Blind and Visually Impaired, believe it’s one of maybe 10 sites in North America offering summer residential sessions for people with vision disabilities.

Now they worry about the immediate future of Enchanted Hills, and their organization as a whole.

LightHouse is among a number of California groups raising the alarm over mounting budget shortfalls within the Department of Rehabilitation, or DOR, the state agency that helps facilitate employment and independent living for people with disabilities.

The reason for the imbalance is a steep upward trajectory in Californians in need of aid.

Between the 2016-17 and 2024-25 fiscal years, the number of people receiving services from the DOR has increased 76%, from about 100,000 residents to nearly 177,000, according to an update distributed at a State Rehabilitation Council meeting last week. Applications for DOR vocational rehabilitation services, which include programs for those with low vision, climbed nearly 50% between 2019 and 2024.

But funding, which largely flows from the federal government, hasn’t kept pace. The DOR’s base federal grant money for vocational rehabilitation has increased just 10.5% since 2017.

Unless it implements a strict “order of selection” process to prioritize recipients, the State Rehabilitation Council argued, the DOR could end up with a deficit of as much as $128 million for vocational rehabilitation in 2027.

Behind the big numbers are real-world impacts.

Shellena Heber, executive director of Valley Center for the Blind, called the DOR “the lifeblood for organizations around the state.”

“I’ve been in this role for 10 years, and the Department of Rehabilitation has always been our No. 1 partner,” she said.

Advocates are particularly worried about a DOR program called Older Individuals who are Blind, or OIB, which has been a crucial force for aging Californians undergoing deteriorating vision or full loss of sight. The program helps recipients learn to safely navigate their homes, cook meals, manage medications and adopt new technology, among other adaptive skills. It also offers low-vision occupational therapy.

Without OIB, Heber said, the blind are more likely to require emergency care, placement in assisted living facilities or other high-cost interventions.

‘Chump change’ for state

OIB programs, funded through grants, are currently looking at a 60% reduction in funding in the 2026-27 California budget. That’s largely the result of Social Security reimbursements the state is apparently allocating elsewhere now.

Across the state, the OIB funding gap is estimated at $3.6 million — “chump change,” as Disability Rights California Director Jeffrey Thom called it during a recent LightHouse Day at the organization’s headquarters, when put in the context of the $350 billion budget recently signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom.

LightHouse is among the entities poised to lose out. The nonprofit received $1.03 million through OIB in the 2025-26 state budget; it’s slated to get $413,000 in the new fiscal year.

That’s a devastating calculus for the Earle Baum Center of the Blind in Santa Rosa, which gets more than 70% of its operating budget from OIB. The money helps power classes in orientation and mobility, independent living skills and adaptive technology.

Access and inclusion are critical

“No. 1, it’s about access and inclusion,” said Patricia Jefferson, a community service specialist at Earle Baum. “If they went to a senior center art class, the teacher might be great, but they may know nothing about how to make it accessible. Here, an art class is made for them.”

That was the case at the 1:30 p.m. Tactile Art class on July 16, where a group of eight women sat around a rectangle of connected desks and collaged black and white pieces of hard foam in various shapes. There were black triangles and white triangles, for example, but the artists could differentiate them through varying thicknesses.

There was constant banter and consultation, and a lot of rocking out to the music coming out of a boom box. Most of the women are regulars who know one another from other classes, like ukulele and tap dance. Jefferson said it’s not uncommon for an Earle Baum client to arrive at 8:30 a.m., bring a lunch, hang out between classes and leave at 4 p.m.

Roxann Randall, 72, has been coming to the center for almost four years. She had detached retinas at the age of 12 and has always struggled with her vision, but lost sight altogether at 60.

It takes Randall roughly an hour to get to Earle Baum, and two hours to get home to Glen Ellen, all via Sonoma County’s paratransit system. She uses VoiceOver technology to control her phone, and an app called BARD to call up audio books.

“This is where I learned it all,” Randall said, sitting in art class.

While Enchanted Hills Napa doesn’t benefit greatly from OIB, some of its services are directly tied to other Department of Rehabilitation programs that are becoming increasingly hard to fund.

The 311-acre camp welcomes children, teens, adults and families, who rotate through one- and two-week sessions, getting hands-on tutoring in everything from woodworking to kitchen skills.

On the recent tour, Enchanted Hills staff crossed paths with Angel Bravo, 20, who is volunteering there for the summer. Bravo was placed through EP!C, a job readiness program for 16-to-21-year-olds. That assignment is funded by the DOR.

Bravo grew up in San Marcos, in San Diego County. “I wish people there knew more about this amazing place,” he said. “I wish I had come as a teenager.”

Enchanted Hills has a core Bay Area clientele, but has welcomed guests from across America, and other countries, including China, Poland, Turkey and the Dominican Republic.

In the spacious and gleaming kitchen at the Enchanted Hills cafeteria, Linda Fonseca carefully measured sugar for a batch of spice cookies, feeling the etched lines of the measuring cup to properly apportion the crystals. It is Fonseca’s 60th year at the camp, either as a guest or a worker.

Making music through technology

Among Enchanted Hills’ biggest fans is Dr. Harvey Brody, 88.

A retired dentist and UCSF researcher and lecturer, Brody called himself a “card-holding member of the denial club” when creeping glaucoma and macular degeneration began to claim his sight six or seven years ago.

As he lost the ability to read texts and emails, and the denial finally gave way, Brody got connected to LightHouse in San Francisco and picked up basic adaptation skills like using an iPhone and laptop.

Attending camp at Enchanted Hills in 2024 was another turning point.

“Being with a group of people who clearly understood what my issues were, and to see how they were functioning — all of a sudden, I pretty much stopped fighting the issue, and actually tried to embrace it,” Brody said in a phone interview.

Especially crucial, he said, was the Victor Reader Stream that came in his camp goodie bag. It’s a 6-ounce, handheld device that can hold dozens of audio books and live recordings, and audibly read out text.

‘I still have some things I want to say’

Brody used it to write down ideas for musical structures and verses, which his daughter then helped him to compile and convert back to audio. In June, seven months after he started using the Victor Reader, Brody uploaded his first song to YouTube.

“Having hearing and visual issues, I couldn’t travel and lecture anymore,” he said. “But I still have some things I want to say.”

With revenue streams beginning to lock into place, recourse is becoming limited for advocacy groups. They have been conferring with stakeholders, setting up meetings with individual state lawmakers and organizing rallies to get the word out.

One of the nonprofits’ big “asks” is getting the DOR to preserve full services to Category 1 recipients — those who live with the most significant disabilities, and thus require the highest degree of support to enter or reenter the workforce — when it implements the order of selection process, while people in other categories are added to a wait list.

Will any of it be enough?

If the budget shortfalls remain in place, the lives of many people experiencing loss of vision are certain to contract. Further down the road, organizations like LightHouse fear the collapse of entire programs and loss of staff at facilities like Earle Baum and Enchanted Hills.

If you think you’re exempt from those losses, said Tony Fletcher, LightHouse’s senior director of alumni relations, you’d better think again. As Californians live longer, more will experience loss of sight.

“A lot of the funding is for you or I, who are going to experience changing vision in the future,” Fletcher said.

You can reach Staff Writer Phil Barber at 707-521-5263 or phil.barber@pressdemocrat.com.