I found this old article and wanted to share it with the list.
www.once.es is the group's website (in Spanish)



SPANISH BLIND GROUP THRIVES ON LARGESS OF LOTTERY

By: CIARAN GILES

Editor's Note: The following article is re-printed from the Associated
Press, May 29, 2000.

MADRID, Spain (AP) - The Spanish Civil War killed and maimed hundreds of
thousands of soldiers and civilians and left much of Spain in ruins.
Yet, for one disabled group, the war's legacy has had advantages.

No one knows how many people were blinded in the 1936-39 conflict, but
eager to rid himself of the problem, dictator Francisco Franco ordered
them to form a national organization and take care of themselves. To
encourage them,
he granted the right to create a national lottery. Six decades later,
with Franco long dead and democracy fully restored, the National
Organization of
Blind Spaniards has blossomed into one of Spain's most successful
businesses and one of the world's most dynamic disabled support groups.

"There's no doubt about it, if you're going to be blind, be Spanish,"
quips Miguel Callejas, a blind man who has sold lottery tickets the past
28 years for ONCE, the Spanish acronym for the organization. Lottery
drawings,
staged every day except Saturday, bring in the equivalent of $2.3
billion a year.  Profits enable the organization to guarantee employment
for nearly all
of Spain's 60,000 blind.

"I know of nothing even comparable to the ONCE in the entire world,"
said Edwin Vaughan, a blind sociology professor at the University of
Missouri who has studied how countries view and treat blind people. "In
nearly every
country, the United States included, blindness is associated with
begging and the blind are virtually totally dependent on welfare
assistance with employment
opportunities severely limited," he said. "In Spain, it's the opposite."

In the United States, unemployment among the blind rarely falls below 70
percent, while in Spain, it's hardly ever above 5 percent, Vaughan said.
The European Blind Union says its latest figures, for 1995, showed that
out of 41,000
blind adults available for work in Germany, only 9,000 had a job. In
France, only 7,000 of the 18,000 working age blind were employed. ONCE
receives no
government subsidy and its board is independent and elected every four
years by its members, all blind or sight-impaired. The growth of the
lottery allowed
ONCE to gradually build up a business empire with stakes in everything
from hotels to construction. In the 1980s, it branched into the media,
founding a
private national TV channel, a national daily newspaper and a popular
radio chain. But sensing expansion was tarnishing its more-important
image as a
caring group for the disabled, ONCE sold off its principal media
holdings -- at a profit.
Nowadays, ONCE is as Spanish as bullfighting, sidewalk cafes and soccer.
Vendors wearing dark glasses and carrying canes pace the streets in
nearly every village, barking out, "Lucky numbers for today!" In the
cities, single
vendors sit in enclosed ONCE kiosks, selling tickets through glass
windows.

The lottery has thrived not only because Spaniards love to gamble, but
because of clever marketing and slick advertising. Midweek coupons sell
for 200 pesetas($1.25), offering a chance at 500 daily top prizes of 5
million
pesetas ($33,000) each and thousands of smaller winnings. The No. 1
prize for the Sunday lottery pays $58,000 a year for 25 years.

Totally independent since 1982, ONCE plows its profits into serving its
members. It runs Europe's biggest guide dog school, a factory whose
products include canes, children's Braille sets and portable
speech-activated computers
and social rehabilitation centers. It also works with other companies,
such as Microsoft, to develop systems and technical innovations for the
blind. On a more
public level, ONCE runs a touch-and-feel art Museum for the Blind. In
1998, it organized an international competition in Madrid for blind
athletes. In recent
years, ONCE has supported projects for the blind abroad, including in
several Latin American nations, notably Chile and Argentina.

ONCE estimates there are 150 million blind people in the world, but many
poor countries do not keep records on who and where they are. "The
ONCE's idea is that the blind should care for the blind. In most
countries, nobody
looks after them at all," said Rafael Mondaca, the organization's
director of international relations. ONCE recognizes that even though it
is private, it has a
privileged position and the government could withdraw its lottery rights
or grant licenses to other causes. "Fortunately, it wouldn't make
business sense for the
Spanish government to do so because it knows that if ONCE crumbled it
would then be responsible for looking after the blind itself," said
Pedro Zurrita,
who heads the World Blind Organization, which is based in Madrid.

"For the Civil War authorities, it was a load off their mind," he said.
"Back then no one thought the lottery was ever going to be so
successful. It's unlikely that any government would do it today."


VICUG-L is the Visually Impaired Computer User Group List.
To join or leave the list, send a message to
[log in to unmask]  In the body of the message, simply type
"subscribe vicug-l" or "unsubscribe vicug-l" without the quotations.
 VICUG-L is archived on the World Wide Web at
http://maelstrom.stjohns.edu/archives/vicug-l.html