Our Deaf Hub provides a safe, supported, social space for Deaf sign language users. We provide a broad range of services and care packages tailored to individual needs.
Here is Nick Cash, Deaf Village Manager to explain a little bit about our wonderful deaf hub and why it is so important for our community.
When a Deaf person first comes to our centre, they are often scared to come in through our front door. Many service users have had difficult lives, often excluded from all but the most basic of human interactions.
People come to us with individual histories of disconnection, exclusion, segregation and exhaustion from just trying to make sense of the world as best they can every single day. As a result of a lifelong lack of communication, our service users often present with mental illness, autism spectrum disorders, personality disorders and/or other concomitant conditions.
Many just lose themselves in their own ‘world’ and need time to learn to engage again and, for the first time, start living.
Our Starting Point
The starting point for us at Our Deaf Hub is always compassion: a hug, a brew, a chance for them to breathe. We allow our new friend to ‘be’; being, in a safe space, where everyone around you is ‘like you’ gives a powerful message to a hurting soul.
Some individuals take a few weeks, others a few months, to calm down just enough to feel safe in our community, and trust us and our help.
Our Staff
Our staff are living Deaf role models, experts in their field. Some have started as service users and have worked hard to turn their own lives around. They will tell you first-hand the damage and disconnection that communication barriers cause. Once with us, Deaf people can start to learn how to trust, and then learn how to communicate.
Only then can we start to engage services to support autonomy and help individuals catch up on the most basic Independent Living Skills needed to navigate their own lives.
Our Deaf Hub
- Builds trust
- Provides a safe and secure space
- Facilitates vital social connections and a root support system for each other
- Informs and involves each individual at every step in their journey
- Advocates autonomy and Independent Living
- Develops communication strategies and encourages expression
- Provides peer-led support and guidance
- Helps individuals to build and maintain relationships i.e. with family
- Promotes communication and community
- Enables active inclusion, interaction and engagement with the wider world
For individuals requiring additional long-term support for everyday life, we can also tailor an individual social care package where vital, yet missing, Life Skills are developed directly to enable the individual to function, then thrive, across all spheres of life.
Spotlight on John
Meet John – We asked him to tell us his story about his time at Our Deaf Hub.