Few HOH People Employed by

Editor: I frequently hear from hard of hearing (HOH) and late-deafened (LD) people that they no longer even look for services from organizations that serve the "Deaf and hard of hearing". Many stories are amazingly similar. A HOH or LD person walks into an agency and is greeted by a Deaf person who signs to them - or a hearing person who signs to them - and tells them they should learn sign language! I rarely hear of a person who walks into a "Deaf and hard of hearing" agency who manages to find a HOH or LD person to talk to!

I have some personal experience in this matter. My LD wife and I served for a couple of years on the board of our local agency that serves the "Deaf and hard of hearing". One of our goals during that time was to convince the organization to hire ONE HOH or LD person, so when a HOH or LD person walked in, they could talk to someone who understands their situation. We were unable to convince them that even ONE of their 25 person staff should be HOH. Yet they continued (and continue to this day) to claim to serve the "Deaf and hard of hearing". And they get a bunch of government money to provide those services.

Here are some comments from Randy Collins that point out a similar situation among the relay providers. My personal opinion is that these folks are really missing the boat. One of these days, some smart relay provider will really pursue the HOH/LD market, and will be richly rewarded for doing so. (By the way, that does NOT mean having a bunch of Deaf and hearing people go after HOH/LD folks.) I think I've seen signs that one of the lesser-known relay providers is moving in this direction, and I'll certainly let you know if those indications become more concrete.

One more thing - anyone interested in taking a more proactive stance in the effort to get more than token support for HOH/LD folks, please email me at larry@hearinglossweb.com . I think it's time to talk about how to do this on a national basis.

Now (finally), here's Randy! His comments are from the HLWork list at YahooGroups (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HLWork), and are reprinted with permission.

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There is and there will be a desperate need for people working with people who are hard of hearing. Baby boomers are going to impact in a big way and many of them are or soon will be HOH! Ha! Ha! We beat them to it; we got here first. There's an advantage to that. You've got professional training and experience as an educator and personal experience as a hard of hearing person, that's marketable. We need more hard of hearing people talking, teaching, advocating for, training, hard of hearing adults. Certainly you should subscribe to Larry's HOH-LD News. He often has jobs advertised that are related to HOH.

I've already stood on my soapbox today but another pet peeve of mine is the shameful record of telecommunications relay companies regarding hard of hearing employment. They are ALL hearing and Deaf. They all have outreach people all over the place. I can count the number of hard of hearing (not culturally hard of hearing) relay employees on one had - and still have enough left over to stick up a finger. Smile.

The Relay companies are mandated to serve hoh people and to provide outreach, but they are not mandated to actually hire hard of hearing people. The overwhelming amount of their effort is spent in efforts to provide outreach and training to the Deaf community! That market has been worked to death; it is saturated. The Relay companies however continue to focus on Deaf people. Why? It's all they know. They don't have any hard of hearing people to speak of, NONE in management. When all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. Sooner or later the Relay companies are going to have to begin to focus on hard of hearing people and they'll need hard of hearing people to do it. Why can't you be part of that effort?