Welcome to the WeSupportDeafAwareness website!
Here you will find out about the campaign, why it has been set up, and how you can help.
Why not check out the video from our founder, Simon Houghton, to get the background to the campaign...
How would you feel if you suddenly couldn’t understand what people said to you?
Say you woke up tomorrow morning, and you couldn’t hear anything. No sounds, no words. How would that make you feel? What would you want people to know? How would you want them to act?
Deafness exists and it is hard enough. But for a large number of people who rely heavily on lip reading, the pandemic has made things a WHOLE lot worse. Masks are necessary, but also a huge barrier for communication.
How SHOULD your staff act when a deaf/hard of hearing customer (or employee) walks in? What SHOULD you do?
With masks set to be in place for the foreseeable future, and well beyond the end of lockdown, #WeSupportDeafAwareness has been set up to help organisations better understand how to engage with the deaf community.
Join the #WeSupportDeafAwareness movement:
Hearing loss affects 5% of the population
Approximately ⅓ of over 65’s are affected by disabling hearing loss
Ref: World Health Organisation
It affects 42% of people aged over 50
One in five adults has a hearing loss of some degree
Ref: Royal National Institute for the Deaf
Show your customers and your employees that you are inclusive, and understand the challenges of communicating when deaf or hard of hearing. Join the campaign to show #WeSupportDeafAwareness.
If you are a not-for-profit organisation, or generate revenue less than £2M per year...
If your business generates more than £2M revenue per year...
As an individual with a considerable hearing loss, I've struggled during lockdown at times, when trying to communicate with others. The masks are absolutely necessary, but it is a significant barrier to communicating with the deaf and hard of hearing.
I wrote about some of my experiences on LinkedIn and it was clear many people didn't realise, nor understood what they should do.
I ran some online training to help people understand what it might be like to be deaf, rely on lipreading and feel excluded.
The feedback to the training has been overwhelming, but it made me realise just how unprepared many organisations are for when we enter the "new normal" of Post-COVID.
I want organisations - for both employees and customers - to show that they understand and can support the deaf and hard of hearing communities.
The training has been further developed, executive summaries added, guidelines and tips have been created. Organisations can now access it, follow the guidelines, and show that they understand in some way what it is like to be deaf. Welcome to #WeSupportDeafAwareness!
Are you simply interested in being more deaf aware? Do you want to learn some simple tips and behaviours that you can apply so that you can communicate more effectively, and help the deaf and hard of hearing to be less isolated?
Download the "7 Easy Ways To Be #Deaf Aware" - no email address required. In return, we'd be really grateful if you could promote our #WeSupportDeafAwareness campaign on social media. It would mean a lot - we are trying to get the message out to as many people as possible.
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