Kristie Colton
Co-founder
Kristie Colton is a co-founder of this organization and a lifelong advocate for inclusion and connection. She’s been visually impaired since the age of nine due to a degenerative eye condition called Stargardt’s. Originally from Utah, she grew up running trails and snowboarding in the mountains, and she ran her first marathon at sixteen. Today, she continues to run and snowboard with the help of her close friend and guide, Jungyeon Park.
Kristie studied computer science at Harvard and works as a software engineer, but her passion for creating more accessible communities led her to co-found this organization. She believes that being a good ally to blind people doesn’t require special training—just curiosity, empathy, and the willingness to learn. Her approach is rooted in the idea that allyship starts with everyday relationships and shared experiences.
Through this work, Kristie hopes to give sighted people the tools and confidence to show up for the blind—not just as bystanders, but as thoughtful, supportive friends, coworkers, teammates, and guides.
Jungyeon Park
Co-founder
Jungyeon met Kristie in college at Harvard, and they have been very close friends since. As a close friend of Kristie, Jungyeon has come to learn more about what it means to be and how to be an ally for the visually impaired community. She learned to guide while running and snowboarding with Kristie, and she now runs with visually impaired athletes throughout the SF Bay Area through the organization Achilles International.
At work, she does software engineering and research for machine and human vision in her roles at Google and Stanford University. She is very interested in the questions that bridge machine and human intelligence.
Anna Filochowska
Founding Team Member
Ania is a management consultant specializing in the latest tech innovations. She earned her MBA from Stanford Graduate School of Business in 2024, where she worked on PocketDot, a startup revolutionizing Braille display technology. Interviewing over 100 members of the blind and visually impaired (BVI) community deepened her understanding of accessibility and allyship, ultimately leading her to join the Vorden Initiative, where she continues to deepen her passion for fostering meaningful allyship.
Ania’s journey began in Warsaw, Poland, where she started formal violin training at age six, and her early musical experiences included performing at the Center for the Blind in her country. She later studied at The Juilliard School in NY and the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia and performed internationally with world-renowned musicians and orchestras such as the Berliner Philharmoniker.