Deaf Awareness Week 2024

This week – 6 to 12 May – it’s Deaf Awareness Week and to mark it we’re holding various activities and sharing content on our website and social media channels. Please do look out for them and share too to help us spread the word.

Here, our director, Patrick O’Dowd, talks more about why awareness weeks like this are important, and how we try to support people from all communities and backgrounds all year round…

Ensuring accessibility for anyone who wishes to engage with our charity is incredibly important to us.

We’re always learning and developing, and I hope our positive, can-do attitude to working alongside people, whatever their background or whichever community they are from means that people know they are safe, welcome and most importantly, respected.

We not only support people via our front-line services, but we also work hard to advocate and call for equality and justice, asking for equal access for all too.

We run a range of training events and other sessions to help people both here at Caritas but also more broadly across Greater Manchester and Lancashire understand how they can improve accessibility in their daily activity too. Our work is underpinned by a concept of Universal Design which helps us ensure our activities are as accessible as possible.

This year sees the 95th anniversary of one of our services, St Joseph’s Mission to Deaf People, and we’ll be sharing more about its unique history as part of Deaf Awareness Week.

Weeks like Deaf Awareness Week are a great way to shine a spotlight on specific issues, groups, communities or other things happening in the world around us. We’re proud to work alongside many people who are deaf or have hearing loss. Some use British Sign Language, with others using spoken language. The feedback and thoughts of people across Greater Manchester and Lancashire are important to us as when it comes to accessibility, conversations are key.

We’re all individuals and all have our own individual needs and wishes, as well as our own adjustments to enable us to engage and interact with or access the world around us. One size doesn’t fit all when it comes to making those adjustments and as individuals and organisations like Caritas, it’s important to continue having conversations and – most importantly – taking into account what people say.

We really hope you are able to share our content and posts this week.

Do get in touch if you have any thoughts or ideas too!