Cast Member Spotlight: Marcus Engel

On this episode of Change Makers, we’re continuing our spotlight series featuring the incredible cast members of The Dot Experience. Opening Friday, October 30, The Dot Experience is a new immersive, inclusive museum that invites visitors to explore blindness, braille, accessibility, and the power of human connection. 

Today, we are learning more about Marcus Engel. Marcus is a professional speaker, author, consultant, podcaster, professor, and, most importantly for us today, a cast member of The Dot Experience.

After our conversation with Marcus, we’ll take you inside The Dot Experience as we share highlights from a recent preview event where attendees of the Association for Education and Rehabilitation of the Blind and Visually Impaired (AER) International Conference toured the museum and experienced a sneak peek of the progress, including the factory tour.

On this Episode

• Narrator
• Marcus Engel, The Dot Experience Cast Member
• Sara Brown, APH Public Relations Manager

Additional Links

• Marcus Engel website
• Marcus Engel LinkedIn profile
• The Dot Experience website
• Email Change Makers

Transcript

Narrator 0:00

Welcome to Change Makers, a podcast from APH. We're talking to people from around the world who are creating positive change in the lives of people who are blind or have low vision. Here's your host.

Sara Brown 0:15

Hello and welcome to Change Makers. I'm APH's public relations manager, Sara Brown, and on today's episode, we're continuing our spotlight series featuring the incredible cast members of the Dot Experience. Opening Friday, October 30th, the Dot Experience is a new, immersive, first of its kind, inclusive museum that invites visitors to explore blindness, braille, accessibility, and the power of human connection. The Dot Experience features more than 20 people who are blind or low vision, each sharing their authentic stories. And today we're going to learn about Marcus Engel. Marcus is a professional speaker, author, consultant, podcaster, and professor. And most importantly, he's a cast member for The Dot Experience. I'm excited to hear his story and learn more about his journey. After our conversation with Marcus, we'll take you inside The Dot Experience as we share highlights from a recent preview event. Now let's talk to Marcus. Hello, Marcus, and welcome to Change Makers.

Marcus Engel 1:13

Thank you for having me. It's exciting to be with you.

Sara Brown 1:16

And I'm excited to be with you. And before we get into the bulk of our questions, I'm gonna ask you the first one that I always like to hear is would you like to introduce yourself to our listeners and let them know who you are?

Marcus Engel 1:28

Sure thing. So my name is Marcus Engel, and I reside in Orlando, Florida. However, I'm a native of St. Louis and I still go back to St. Louis quite a bit to be with family and friends. I am professionally a speaker and author and healthcare consultant and professor and podcaster. I do uh I wear a lot of different hats in my work, and uh what I do really revolves around teaching compassion.

Sara Brown 2:00

And I always like to hear the beginnings. Do you want to talk about your childhood, where you grew up? Are you just said somewhere St. Louis? Yeah. And what were your some of your favorite things? What was what was Little Marcus like back then?

Marcus Engel 2:12

Little Marcus. So Little Marcus was born a normal kid. I grew up my first 10 years in uh in St. Louis, Missouri in Ferguson. And whenever I was in the fourth grade, my parents decided that they wanted to get back to their roots. They moved our family from the suburbs to the country. Uh so I grew up on a farm outside of a small town called High Hill, Missouri. And uh growing up, I was just a typical kid. I was involved in all the typical things of young life. I was in um high school band and choir and national honor society. Uh I played four years of varsity football on the offensive line, and I was just a normal red-blooded American kid until my freshman year of college when I was home for the weekend and had gone into St. Louis to visit some friends, and it was on our way home that night after a hockey game that the car that I was riding in was struck broadside by a drunk driver, and that crash took me from typical 18-year-old college freshman Marcus to now newly blinded Marcus who was living through an incredible amount of physical trauma. In addition to bilateral sight loss, I also had what's called a LeFort III fracture. If you're not familiar with the medical terminology, it means pretty much every bone in the face between the hairline and the chin has been crushed. And I had a long and arduous recovery in St. Louis, physical recovery, hundreds of hours of time spent on an operating room table until um until I was finally healed up medically enough that I was able to take my first step of trying to go back to college and back to try to pick up the the uh pieces of my life. And so I um about a year after the trauma, I found myself at the Colorado Center for the Blind in Denver, and I was learning how to uh be independent. I was learning all new uh tricks of the trade, things that I was going to need to know how for, uh to use uh orientation and mobility, to read braille, to um to learn how to use computers with uh voice output. I had I had all of these skills that I needed to learn. And that that took up um, gosh, I guess almost two years of my life until I was finally able to step foot back onto that college campus where I had departed from one October night and then uh came back two years later as a very changed person.

Sara Brown 5:18

Let's talk a little bit about that. You left the college campus one way, and years later, two years later, you go back another way. How what was that feeling returning back to college?

Marcus Engel 5:33

So by the time I got back to college, I had already survived hundreds of hours of surgery and months of hospitalization. I had graduated from the Colorado Center for the Blind. I had received my first CI dog. So by the time I got back to college, I um I had accomplished a few things, right? I had I had some confidence uh about me because I had accomplished these things. Now I got back into college, and that's when things changed, and I realized that the previous two years that had been a physical journey. Now the journey was to try to find happiness in this world that had been changed forever, and I didn't know exactly how I was gonna do that, and I will be the first one to admit the isolation and the loneliness uh during that first year back in college was crushing. Uh, but just like anything, what do we do? You put one foot in front of the other, you take it one day at a time, you rely on your loved ones, and you learn every single day, right? You learn every day. And so that's what I was doing once I got back into college.

Sara Brown 7:01

So, what did you get into that turned things around for you?

Marcus Engel 7:05

Yeah, one of the things that that really helped turn things around for me was I spent my my summer between my freshman and sophomore year of college working at a church camp. And this church camp was about an hour outside of St. Louis, Camp Moval. And this was a just a really typical church camp. I had grown up going to this church camp. And so that summer we had hundreds of campers from all over the state that came into the into the camp. And uh I, as a staff person, we were short staff that summer. So I got put in positions that I didn't know that I could do. And I was teaching kids archery and I was teaching kids campfire building and uh you know canoeing, and I was with them at the pool all the time. Uh, and these are things that I was learning how to do with my blindness, and it's like, well, if I can teach these kids this, that I can do these things with my blindness, that should show them too that they can do just about anything that they set their minds to. And it was a learning experience for me that year, uh, that summer, because I I started to see a lot of the leadership qualities that I had, but they had kind of been laying dormant for a couple of years while I went through physical recovery and rehab.

Sara Brown 8:37

Talk about how that got you to where you are today, because you are a man of many talents. Motivational speaker was one of them. Talk about how did you get into that?

Marcus Engel 8:49

So I think those of us who have ever gone through something extremely dramatic and life-changing, or maybe it's not even life-changing, maybe it's just uh a negative experience of any sort. I think those of us who have truly suffered, we don't want other people to suffer in that same way. And when I thought about what do I have to share, I knew that the physical trauma that I had endured was something that was greater than most physicians ever see in their careers, right? You're not seeing a LeFort III fracture every day, you're not seeing somebody who comes into the emergency room having been in this field in the street. And so I knew I had a dramatic story of recovery and resiliency. But what I really wanted to do in the early days was just to make a purpose out of what "why did this all happen" right? I'm I'm very human. I asked that question of "why, why me?" "Why did this have to happen to me?" And I think when I started speaking professionally, that's whenever it kind of clicked in. This is exactly what you're supposed to be doing is sharing the story. So I have been speaking for the last gosh 25, 30 years. Um, and when I started out speaking, I I was really only working in colleges and high schools and middle schools. And my main purpose was to try to keep young people from making poor choices, especially concerning substance abuse and driving. I didn't want any teenager to have to go through the kind of uh horrible medical recovery or blindness that I had to go through because of somebody else's poor choice or a poor choice of their own. Well, somewhere along the way, I started switching from that prevention message into more of a compassion message. And the reason why was because I started speaking a lot in health care. And I knew that in healthcare I had received through my medical recovery some of the most compassionate, beautiful, solid, exemplary care that anybody could receive. I had nurses and doctors who truly cared about me and loved me as a person, not just as a patient, not just as somebody that they quote unquote had to take care of. But those compassionate pieces of communication are what I started sharing with healthcare audiences. That's been now 20 years. I've written a couple of books. One is called I'm Here, Compassionate Communication and Patient Care. Another one is called The Other End of the Stethoscope: 33 Insights for Excellent Patient Care. And both of these books are memoir, but they're also some teaching points about what are the little things that docs and nurses can do. So, and not just docs and nurses, but really anybody in healthcare can do to help patients at the other end of the stethoscope feel seen and heard, and their independence and their dignity is left intact. That's what I try to do these days. I'm also an adjunct professor at the University of Notre Dame. I teach compassion science to pre-med students. My master's is in a field called narrative medicine. Got that master's from Columbia in New York. And so in narrative medicine, we take the stories of healthcare and we try to take the stories and turn them into something that we can learn from. And that's what I get to do these days is work with audiences across the country to try to help them understand what is compassion, how can it best be communicated, and what are the little things that we can do to help patients on their road to recovery?

Sara Brown 13:20

How receptive have healthcare professionals been to this compassionate message that you're sharing? Because everybody has had, hopefully everybody has had wonderful nurses and nurse, wonderful doctors. But when you don't have the best nurse, when you don't have the best doctor, you remember that. But how receptive has have has your audience been to this?

Marcus Engel 13:41

Very receptive over 20 years. My um my books, there's probably 60 or 80 nursing schools around the country that use my books and curriculum in their coursework and in different ways too, uh, to try to teach those compassionate communication efforts. But yeah, if we can take these students that have not yet become jaded by the healthcare system, if we can take them and get some of these uh compassion facets hardwired into them early on, then maybe they don't forget it. Maybe then it doesn't become just a patient in room 204. But you're actually thinking of, oh, "that's Sarah, that's my patient. She's not a room number, she's not a diagnosis, she's not a she's not a prognosis, she's not a procedure, she's a human being, a fully formed whole human being." That type of ability to be seen and recognized, I I think it it it goes across healthcare, it's just human, right? We all want that. We all want to be to know that we are seen, that we are understood, and that we want our autonomy and our dignity to be respected as we heal, as we heal.

Sara Brown 15:11

Now, Marcus, you are a Cast Member in The Dot Experience. So I always like to ask, and that's one of the one of the questions I'm asking all the cast members, are how does it feel to have your story shared in The Dot Experience?

Marcus Engel 15:29

It wow, it it's it brings about several emotions. Um, one is pride that the work that I've done over 25 years is being recognized by an organization like APH. That is um uh it's affirming and and it makes me proud that the work that I've done has been noticed. Um it it also it also leaves me longing, I suppose, because we have to have experiences because still even in 2026, so many people are so unfamiliar with blindness, right? And we want to have a greater awareness of blindness throughout the society, and if my story can be part of that, then I I am so glad to contribute.

Sara Brown 16:26

And what do you hope guests take away from The Dot Experience?

Marcus Engel 16:33

I hope that guests walk away with the notion and with the idea that blind people are just people, right? Some of us have gone through um an amazing amount of trauma on our on our journey. Uh sometimes the blindness is the trauma for others, and in a world that is really not set up for people who live with vision loss, we're surviving every day, and not just surviving, but we are thriving consistently as blind people to set newer and higher goals for ourselves. And I really think that as a person, uh, we should always be setting newer and higher goals for ourselves. I I I hope that people walk away from the God experience feeling inspired, uh, uplifted, and and really I hope that other uh other people who are living with vision loss might find some kind of resonance in in my story that they can apply to their to their own journey.

Sara Brown 17:50

And my last question I always ask is Is there anything else you would like to share or discuss before I let you go?

Marcus Engel 17:59

Well, I would love to connect with anyone. I am uh I I've been doing this for 25 years. I am in a transitional phase of life these days, and so I would love to connect with anyone via LinkedIn or feel free to reach out to me through my website, which is just my name. It's marcusengle.com. And um, I'm just I'm just excited to be part of The Dot Experience. I'm proud to be associated with APH. And um thank you for for such a such a great interview today, too. You're wonderful.

Sara Brown 18:33

All right, Marcus, and I will put a link in the show notes to Marcus Engels' website for anybody looking to reach out and connect with him. So, Marcus, thank you so much for taking time out of your day to talk to me on Change Makers.

Marcus Engel 18:46

My pleasure.

Sara Brown 18:47

During the last week of July, members of AER got an exclusive behind-the-scenes look at The Dot Experience while still under construction. They explored where future exhibits will go, met the team behind the museum, and shared their first impressions. Let's take a listen and hear what they had to say.

Laura 19:05

My name is Laura and I'm from Abu Tech. Uh, we make games for the blind and visually impaired. There was a conference. I was here as a vendor, we don't sell as an exhibitor, and they gave me this opportunity to come and explore. I guess I just love creative thinking, and I really want to experience how they've changed the game when it comes to museums, figuring out all the different ways. I've just got past the lobby and I'm already impressed with everything I see.

Chris Mozier 19:32

Chris Moser with Solid Light. Uh well, we started five years ago with the printing house team and really just started to figure out what does it even mean to create an accessible exhibit. Um and how do we start thinking about that process differently? Uh baking in accessibility inclusion at the very beginning of the design process versus uh as an add-on later uh once exhibits are installed. Um so for the last five years, we've just really been learning, uh testing a lot, bringing in the prototyping group from the community, having them tell us where we're wrong and how we can improve. Um so you know, tonight we're starting to see some of those things uh come to reality and starting to hear uh how people are starting to talk about some of those. Uh the one of the great things about this project is that we're in Louisville and we can bring our staff out to see some of the work that they um get to create together, uh, really affect different communities. Um our staff and their families will be able to like come and enjoy this and show off a little bit. Um I just wish that more of them were able to see like this initial public reaction to um you know from a community that is often underrepresented or under um prioritized within museums, uh, space is really built for them. We didn't wait for this project to uh get to this point, to start feeling like it's complete, to be learning and or putting what we've learned into practice on other reports. Um we're starting projects off with tough questions with new clients about what does accessibility mean to them and how are they um prioritizing it, or to what level do they want to prioritize it within their project? Um so it's really an ethos and a practice that we've um started to embed into how we think about design, how do we think about fabrication, how do we think about media development. Um, and it's not something, like I said, not something we've been waiting on, you know, to finish one thing to figure out how we're gonna use it. We've just been trialing and pushing it forward with every opportunity we've had. I'd say that this has been um possible just based in a a partnership with APH. Um we've learned a lot from them. I know they've learned a lot from us. I think having a great uh client partner team and all the subconsultants that we've worked with, uh the architect group, K. Norman Berry Associates , um the accessibility consultants, Prime Access Consulting, Inc., we've really had a great just team of people that are interested in doing things better and working together to get there.

Karen Carl 21:48

I'm Karen Carl. I'm a TVI with Francis House School District in Missouri. I think it's gonna be really impressive when it's all done and all the pieces are in place. Um what I saw. uh was really neat. I think it's gonna be a really fun visit next time I come. It looks like it's going to hit a lot of different uh modalities of how people experience things. So you even the people who are um if they're deaf blind if they're deaf or if they're visually impaired or whatever I think they're going to get a chance to feel to touch to s to sense the sensors senses are all going to be engaged.

Autumn Booths-Speer 22:33

My name is Autumn Booths-Speer and I am a contractor based out of the state of Connecticut. So I was here four years ago and I saw the original museum and comparing the new one here to the original is incredible. I've been in the field nine years now and so being able to see all the renderings upstairs of what it's going to turn into is just encompassing the field so much more. I think the thing I'm looking forward to the most is having people who don't really know anything about the field come in and really see what the field has to offer. From TVIs which I am I'm also an OM specialist seeing what we do you know the biggest thing was seeing the rendering for the car upstairs to see and say hey that's actually my daily life you know my car is full of things from the start of August all the way through June. People in the blind and visually impaired field are capable of doing anything they set their minds to. What I always tell my students is you can do the same things that your peers can do. It just looks a little different. So I hope that anyone who attends obviously anyone in our field knows that but anyone else maybe who's outside of the field they know that hey anyone who is blind or visually impaired can do what I do. It just might look a little different.

Donte Little 23:46

My name is Donte Little I'm the assistant director of special projects with the Alabama Institute for Deaf and Blind. I have direct oversight over the Center for Assisted Technology which is a collaboration between APH and AIDB. I've had a full walking tour and I really enjoyed it and look forward to seeing it fully built out one thing that really sparked my interest was seeing the cross section of what a T VI would have in their car their mobile office so to say that really inspired me because it uh brings back my own experiences of working out there as a TVI seeing all the different things they would carry in their car. So yes I think this is a great and wonderful experience. I want people to remember uh accessibility and how Braille literacy and the whole context although it's Dot experience I want people to understand that Braille literacy is so important. Literacy in general is very important to our blind community.

Darrick Wood 24:42

So I'm Darrick Wood, the director of The Dot Experience and we are in the galleries with hopefully you can hear behind us a lively group of uh people for a conference that's here in town. This is our first chance to open up the building to people to kind of shake out the wrinkles in our in our you know uh in our expectations to really try things out with people and uh it has been an incredible success. A lot of wows and it has been really nice to be able to capture those because a lot of people have been thinking about this stuff for a very long time and so it is really nice to have a group of people in here who uh you who have a deep experience either in museums, as TVIs, as educators in blind vision fields, in disability awareness, people who know things to come in and say oh wow oh I like how you're doing this or I never thought about that or I came not expecting things at this level. So it is very validating for us but also it's the right crowd to say and for us to humbly hear here's what could be better, here's what we could tweak here's what we could do. So it's some really great conversations about all the possibilities where the dot is going. Well I care very deeply we've talked about this before Sarah I care very deeply about how people feel when they leave a place and so what I'm hoping is when people walk out of here they understand themselves a little bit better and the world feels a little bit different as far as possibilities of ways that people can plug into the world of new communities that maybe they have not been a part of or have not known the breadth and depth of to really say oh the world seems different now and I kind of like how I can plug into all this how I can do this. That's what I'm really hoping. But really I just want people to to come here and feel this it is really nice this is the level that we finally have been we've been excited about for years of people coming in the doors and the energy in these spaces the excitement that people have the the kind of permission that the spaces have given people to kind of turn to strangers around them and say so what are you all about? How do you fit into this?

Steve Baskis 26:54

You know I'm learning this about myself I want to share this with somebody so those kinds of like building connections so I guess I would just say please come I hope we wow you um as much as we're hoping to my name is Steve Baskis. I'm here with Olaya she's graciously helped me uh guided me through the museum and through the headquarters. I was the uh keynote for the opening ceremony for AER on this trip and uh I'm just thankful to to have my opportunity you know the opportunity to share my story. I'm a service member I served in the United States Army and I lost my eyesight during combat operations in Baghdad, Iraq 18 years ago on the ground there in Iraq. I was part of a security detachment for a brigadier general we were protecting we were bodyguards. I had a good friend, he died next to me and I lost my eyesight that day and I had to rebuild my life. When I opened up the ceremony I was really just talking about this whole field uh OM instructors orientation and mobility instructors educators of the blind and and and visually impaired. I I wanted to honor them and and tell tell them where I've gone with my life and how I've rebuilt my life and so that's that's really what I spoke about it when when I opened up the ceremony orientation and mobility instructors. My OM instructor actually grew up in one of towns I I lived in. I did not cross paths with her at all as a young person, but after I lost my eyesight, I chose to go to Chicago to Edward Hines Junior VA hospital. When I made that decision, I was put in touch with Michelle Robinson and Michelle was my OM instructor she grew up in Rancho Illinois where I grew up and her father was was a dentist who worked on my brother's teeth but I did not realize she was an orientation and mobility instructor. So it was such a wild coincidence and I went through Heinz and learned how to navigate with a long white cane uh which gave me independence and the ability to live my life again. Beyond that, I was able to learn how to use technology learn how to do different things you know daily whether that was take care of myself, you know personal hygiene, all these different things that rehab provided to me, and because of that because of going early right after I lost my eyesight I was able to get back on track and find my way through life again and do all the great things I've been able to do. I've climbed around the world on four four of the continents, four of the seven summits the seven tallest peaks in the world. I've kayaked down major rivers like the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon and just so many things ski bike climb paddle. I've represented the United States in the US Paralympics and and meddled on national level and and I've competed on the world level so it's been it's been an amazing experience and I shared that in my keynote. Well I'm excited that they are making this immersive and having this opportunity to walk through the museum and learn about what will be available uh as as it is completed. It was amazing to touch you know, Stevie Wonder's piano here and play on it. It was amazing to touch Helen Keller's brailler. You know I think having the opportunity to really touch the plaques and feel the people's faces uh to to learn about the history of the museum the history of the people that have shaped our world and shaped our future and and to be part of it is is truly remarkable. And so I'm I'm thankful to have had this opportunity to walk through the the space uh and really feel it you know people should share their dreams, their passions, their problems, their challenges. Always don't be shy, don't be afraid, because if you don't share what you want to do in in life, you don't share your struggle, and people don't know how to help you, and if if people can help you, and you share what you are struggling with, it gives you that ability to pursue your dreams your goals. So I just hope that people will share their dreams and goals.

Sara Brown 31:34

Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Change Makers. I have put links in the show notes so anyone wanting to reach out to Marcus Engle and I have put a link in the show notes for the website of The Dot Experience. Do you have a podcast topic or question send me an email at changemakers@ aph.org and as always be sure to look for ways you can be a change maker this week