Meet our volunteers: Charlotte Makepeace
Charlotte is living with retinitis pigmentosa. She is a mum of two and is currently working on her PhD, the highest level of academic degree. Her sight loss condition has not held her back.
Her parents started to suspect that there was something not quite right with her vision when she was three, but she didn’t receive a formal diagnosis until she was 11 or 12 because her presentation didn’t follow the usual pattern. She was registered blind at the age of eight and by 14, had lost a lot of her useful sight. She does have light perception and can sometimes see colour, depending on the light conditions, but has no depth perception. She is completely night blind and remembers being very surprised when she discovered that there were stars in the sky, because she had never seen them!
She relies on assistive devices, whether that is her cane, screen readers or her mobile phone. She has also had a guide dog in the past but doesn’t have one currently.
Her parents were in touch with RP Fighting Blindness, as Retina UK was known then, when Charlotte was younger and she ran the London Marathon for the charity in 2014 with her mum as her guide runner. She said “never again. It turns out I hate running.”
Charlotte signed up to be a Talk & Support volunteer with Retina UK in spring 2025. She said: “It felt like a nice fit. I like talking, I’m quite chatty and I’m quite open to talk about my experiences to help someone who may be struggling.
“I’ve always done a lot of volunteering throughout my life. I was part of a local charity when I was a teenager and I was on a youth committee. A least once a year I go into my son’s school and do a blindness awareness assembly. I’ve always wanted to be quite active in the blind community. For me, awareness and understanding can’t ever be a bad thing.”
She went on to say “I didn’t know a lot of blind people like me when I was growing up. I had quite severe sight loss at a young age and the expectation at school was that I probably wasn’t going to go on to work and I would live on benefits. That’s not remotely what I’m doing. I think it’s quite important for the next generation of blind people to see someone who is still fairly young, managing to parent and in the highest form of education. You don’t have to be held back. There just needs to be adaptation.”
Talking about her volunteering experience, she said: “I feel very supported and I can ask if there is anything I am unsure about. The points of contact are quite clearly signposted so if I have a question, I can easily get in touch. You don’t have to have a huge amount of time. That’s the lovely thing about volunteering. It can be as much or as little as you want it to be. That kind of flexibility works for me.”
If you are interested in volunteering for Retina UK, please visit: RetinaUK.org.uk/get-involved/volunteer-for-us/.