Meet Donna McCaskill, Blind Low Vision NZ’s newest Board Chair

At the end of 2025, Blind Low Vision NZ (BLVNZ) and Royal New Zealand Foundation for the Blind (RNZFB) welcomed Donna McCaskill as its new Board Chair. The D*List recently caught up with Donna on her ambitions in this new role.

Governance isn’t new for Donna. And neither is doing the work on the ground. When she lived in Auckland, she worked for BLVNZ for a month short of 20 years, and worked in pretty much most of the portfolios. In the last five years, she’s been a Board member for BLVNZ while living in Ashburton, working within the agriculture and recruitment space.

Donna’s membership with BLVNZ began when she was born. Coming from a family with a dominant gene for congenital cataracts, blindness was just an unremarkable part of everyday life. As an adult, she has experienced supported, and unsupported worlds.

“I started off going to Homai School for the Blind (now known as BLENNZ Homai Campus), and then I was mainstreamed. So I had that schooling background of being, for lack of a better word, institutionalised, and then going into mainstream.

“And I studied, I'm in mainstream employment, and I’d done all of those things independently, but was aware of what was available.”

Donna has two sons who are also blind and members of BLVNZ. “They were mainstreamed their whole lives, and they had minimal support from Blind Low Vision, but that was my choice, to make them as independent as possible.”

The blindness community and broader disability community is where her heart is. “That takes up a lot of my time, but you know I don’t look at it that way.” She says if she can help someone, especially when it comes to accepting their disability, that’s her reward. Donna is also a trustee for The D*List and part of Te Ope Tāmiro — Te Kahu Raunui (Sport Integrity Commission).

The tenure for the Board Chair role is for a year, and Donna wants her leadership to be memorable and hopefully go on longer. “I’m just honoured to be given the opportunity, especially given there’s so much experience on our Board,” she says. “We were really fortunate to have a lot of experience and knowledgeable people that can guide me and show me leadership where they may not have had themselves.”

Succession planning and growing leadership in the community has always been important to Donna. “We can’t be the only ones leading… I think it’s really important to nurture our rangatahi and help them grow because so often you don’t know what you don’t know.”

Some other focal points for Donna is to improve the voting system to better represent members, and to future-proof the longevity of the organisation so that future generations can make use of its services.

“If I can look back in a year’s time and know that people are getting the service they need in a timely fashion, then I know I have achieved, because at the moment, there’s still a little bit of wait times and things like that for the services that are needed.”

While she’s got a new title, Donna wants people to remember that she’s just another person. “I’m still the same person that likes to go out and have fun and plays all sorts of sports and likes to socialise. The reason that I am where I am is because I like to be engaged in the community. I like to talk to people and I like to hear from people so I’m not this big scary person that suddenly changed and has suddenly become very PC.”

“For any person that’s on our Board, we’re all just people that you can come and talk to, and it’s important you do talk to us because we want to know what’s going on in our community that we’re supposed to be leading and representing and doing things for.

“I honestly just want to do people proud.”

To contact Donna McCaskill, call Blind Low Vision NZ on 0800 24 33 33 and ask to speak to Board secretary Diana Chandler to pass on a message, or find Donna on social media.