Friday, May 25, 2007

INCLUSION not ISOLATION

While we applaud and commend deaf groups for establishing group homes and rehabilitiation centers exclusively for the deaf communities, we must frown at the idea of isolating members of the deaf communities from the general hearing society.

Isolating deaf people from the general hearing society goes a long way to hurt our status as first class citizens.

The reason we won the deal to refit over 150 drug and alcohol rehabilitation facilites with access equipment for the deaf is we are believers of integration and inclusivity of deaf people into the general hearing society.

We also have plans to expand this out to domestic violence shelters, children homes, and homeless shelters. Our goal, which we believe is entirely achievable, is to replace deaf isolation with deaf inclusion.

The results of our beliefs in inclusion, and of our actions in the long run, we're helping deaf people contribute and share their lives, skills, hopes, vision, and talents directly with the larger hearing society.

We are an agency unlike any other with outreach programs and policy serving our prime purpose : absolute triumph over isolation in our general society.

By so doing, our agency is helping deaf people re-establish their rightful place in society as first class citizens.

9 comments:

  1. I'm not familiar with your programs, but I think more interaction between Deaf and Hearing folks will go a long way in letting us hearies see what were doing wrong. Besides running things that Deaf people should be running.

    Dennis

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  2. i dont know what you are talking about...
    100% inclusion ?
    who wants that?

    i dont want it...
    sure we can try to get interpreters for weddings, family reunions, etc...good luck on that

    today we still have all-girls schools, all-black churches..
    are they wrong?

    you gonna stop them ?

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  3. We're not stopping them, were giving the deaf community more choices than be herded like sheep.

    Richard

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  4. I think it is entrenched attitudes like Richard's that tend to delay real equality, it is using the rights argument to justify, non-integration, via 'choice'. Has Richard the complete skills TO integrate anyway ? A lot of us don't.

    After 200 years of campaigning to stand alongside hearing as equals, what we see is a hard core of deaf people who consider this either alien, or 'enforced oralism'.

    I suspect a lot of this stems from a very simple fact, they find 'integration' just too hard. No-one said integration or equality would be easy... I think the majority of deaf people would prefer the REAL choice of being 'out there' or not, and would not use the difficulties of communication as an opt out, it defeats campaigns to make people aware, if at the end of the day you are not going to accept these people coming in, or have no intention whatever, of going out.

    MM

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  5. Deaf people can actually be taught the skills to integrate themselves into the society at the rehab centers, childrens homes, and domestic violence shelters.

    The access equipment in the facilities is the first step in making it possible for the deaf people learn these skills.

    Richard

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  6. D.U.M.B idea :-(!!

    Did you ever think about the expenses of having to hire interpreters, staff to learn ASL, providing TTY/VP and other things. You have to make this 100% accessible to deaf people, otherwise this program will fail.

    Deaf people feel more comfortable and have a chance to recover more successfully when there are staff who can sign ASL fluently, there are recovering Deaf addicts/staff there to provide support and other things. If they were to be mainstreamed with the hearing people, there are bound to be a lot of problems to come up and cost more money in the long run.

    I personally wouldn't want to go in a center that offers very limited accessibility to deaf people and does not have a model for deaf people to follow through.

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  7. ziwmfxbObviously America is different to the UK. what we see is deaf schools educating deaf children in EVERYTHING except how to survive in mainstream.

    There's no integration lessons or anything like it, as a result many deaf leave school with no skills to manage in mainstream, to my mind that deaf education is a waste of time, it is not enabling the deaf, and many leave school take one long look, and then try to find the nearest deaf center, they can become 'lost' to the mainstream after that. I suggest this ISN'T inevitable.

    Hence why these sites are FULL of deaf people who cannot understand the hearing systems and ways and feel up against it, they're simply not made aware at day one. Of course life is a bitch then it goes downhill, but that, is part of life, not necessarily down to the fact you cannot hear..

    MM

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  8. Excuse me.

    The supreme court ruled that the costs of accommodations can not be argumentable in any case.

    Even though they had plenty of opportunities, they never came up with a model rehabilitation facility as recidivism rates from their experiments has shown to be much higher than the average for a similar facility.

    And finally the future of deaf society will not be including manual communications as they are now and its proper to prepare these facilities now for the future of the deaf society.

    Richard

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  9. Indeed ! deaf communication has changed in the last 10-15 years, you simply cannot carry on as if it will always be the same. BSL is totally different now from 10 years ago.

    Anonymous says how are you going to stop 'sector-only' education ? the answer is not to stop the education, but to include these sectors more in the mainstream of things, so all this misunderstanding, separatism, and suspicion gets negated.

    You cannot integrate by proxy...In the UK we have taken steps to do this already, and few deaf are in specialist schools any more here. The UK also suggested single faith schools started taking in non-believers too, to approach the other side of the issue.

    Very pertinent in today's problems with Iraq and terrorism. We even objected to the veil here because it prevented deaf people lip-reading the face of the speaker, and have successfully banned it in schools to a degree. There will perhaps always be 'elitist' types of education, because cash/choice will rule, but they will, be in a real minority, and not effect secularization of the deaf..

    MM

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