The Deaf Village is our aspiration for a working outdoor village within and around the White House grounds; a beautiful space in the Fenniscowles-Pleasington Valley cusp that brings hearing and Deaf communities together in nature.
Our vision for the North West region is to establish a strong, cohesive and prosperous community where everyone is active, treated fairly and thriving, and where people’s faiths and cultures are understood and respected. Our activities will address segregation, reduce social exclusion and continually value and embrace our diversity, enriching all of our lives through community endeavours.
The Deaf Village is a Deaf-Led organisation that promotes inclusivity at its core.
Our Deaf Village strives to, develop, maintain, operate and manage a number of services that are inclusive within the local community and the wider boroughs.
The Deaf Village actively strives to encourage community and bridge the distance between hearing and D/deaf worlds. Our aim is to create a vibrant outdoor space where our communities can come together in shared endeavours.
The Deaf Village provides access to specialist D/deaf service provisions including:
- A specialist Deaf resident provision, known as the White House
- Our Deaf Hub, which offers an in-reach/out-reach service to the Deaf community
- Deaf Village Enterprises led by the Deaf, for our Deaf and hearing community
- The Deaf Village actively strives to encourage community and bridge the distance between hearing and D/deaf worlds. Our aim is to create a vibrant outdoor space where our communities can come together in shared endeavours.
The Deaf Village provides:
- Opportunities for working with the land
- Outdoor team-building space
- Woodland crafts, forestry skills, horticulture, team building, holistic therapies
- A Community Garden
- Physical activities and outdoor wellbeing
- A communal gathering place to meet and eat together
The Science Bit
The Deaf Village forms our Affinity Space, a magical world-within-a-world where two worlds, hearing and Deaf, come together in unity and oneness towards a shared endeavour. There are so many fears and misunderstandings about Deaf people, our abilities, our language and our ways of being.
We believe that by encouraging oneness between our two worlds, we can start to reduce fears and stigma. Working together we can broaden mindsets and horizons!
Our hopes for the future
We would love to see our communities working together to make the Deaf Village a wonderful, working landscape. We need lots of help to make our vision a reality!
Our land needs work to help make it accessible, friendly, child-safe, welcoming and most importantly … to encourage nature – and each other – to flourish.
We’d love to grow our Deaf Village family and work with individuals, national, regional and local organisations and colleges to skill-share and support each other in making our wider community a safe, beautiful, shared space for generations to come.
We are open to any ideas you may have for us working together, alongside each other, to bring joy and inspiration to this beautiful woodland idyll. As with any lasting legacies, we can’t do it on our own.
Spotlight on Umayr
Meet Umayr – We asked him to tell us his story about his time at Our Deaf Hub.