A local nonprofit serving the Deaf and hard of hearing is getting a new office and a chance to grow this summer.

The Washington Advocates of Deaf and Hard of Hearing’s Tri-Cities office relocated from Kennewick to Pasco on July 1.

The space was donated by a woman with a deaf daughter, enabling the organization to stay there rent-free. 

After some construction and repainting, the larger space also will offer room for expansion.

WADHH’s Tri-Cities branch currently has two staff, Zachary Shawn DeLoya, executive director/legal, and Robin Traveller, community advocate and senior coordinator. Traveller said that the organization expects to hire more staff in the future, and that they hope to add more programs.

The nonprofit’s mission is to serve and empower hearing loss communities to meet their educational, technical and social needs. 

That mission is encapsulated in the group’s logo, which is two fists touching across an outline of Washington. Traveller said that it means advocate or support.

Serving range of clients

The organization serves a range of clients with hearing challenges. It also has offices in Vancouver, Yakima and Spokane.

Much of WADHH’s work is in communication assistance, advocacy services, immigration services and independent living skills, though the group also offers employment resources, deaf awareness and sensitivity training, and health and wellness resources. 

Communication assistance might mean having someone translate a conversation into American Sign Language for a deaf person. Traveller and DeLoya have videophones to best communicate with those they serve. 

Other services could include teaching ASL or helping clients who have had a stroke learn to sign with one hand. 

Traveller was born hard of hearing before becoming fully deaf. She only picked up ASL after becoming deaf, while also going to school full time. Traveller had met a woman from the WADHH who signed to her, and she was eventually able to work as a community advocate there.

After spending 13 years working in Utah, she returned to the Tri-Cities when she retired in 2018 and began work with WADHH again. She said she deeply cares about the needs of her clients and supports them by giving back.

Tapping into technology

The Covid-19 pandemic was a particularly difficult time for Traveller and the Deaf and hard of hearing community. 

With everyone wearing masks, lip reading became impossible, leaving Traveller and others no way of understanding what people were saying. The pandemic was a “nightmare,” she said.

One strategy that Traveller learned to employ was the live captions feature on her phone, found under “accessibility” in the phone’s settings. The feature will caption anything being said, although the text won’t save unless it’s copied into another document. 

This tool was useful throughout Covid and can still be helpful in certain settings, like when ordering at a restaurant. 

Educational outreach

Traveller’s work includes teaching courses to help the Deaf and hard of hearing. Recently, she taught an intermediate ASL class with five attendees. The Deaf and hard of hearing community in the Tri-Cities is small, and the number of people seeking resources fluctuates, she said. They don’t turn anyone away.

She hopes to teach additional classes on beginning and intermediate ASL, speech reading or lip reading, living with hearing loss, coping skills and how to fix miscommunication. 

Part of what Traveller would teach in a course on coping skills would be protecting hearing. 

She noted that there are many loud things in today’s world – concerts, loud music, construction, dental work and more – and noise control is important. Like Traveller, others who are currently hard of hearing may end up with total hearing loss. 

The World Health Organization’s first World Report on Hearing, released in 2021, reported that nearly 2.5 billion people worldwide, or one in four people, will have some degree of hearing loss by 2050.

With projections like that, Traveller’s role and organization may become all the more critical. 

She and DeLoya are “very enthusiastic to help,” Traveller said, and they “will be expanding as time goes along.”

New office location

The Washington Advocates of Deaf and Hard of Hearing’s new office is at 124 N. Fifth Ave., Pasco. DeLoya can be reached by videophone at 509-416-2138 or by email at zachary.deloya@wadhh.org, and Traveller can be reached by video phone at 509-498-6412 or by email at robin.traveller@wadhh.org. 

Garage sale fundraiser

The nonprofit also will be hosting a garage sale as a fundraiser from 4-7 p.m. Aug. 23 and 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Aug. 24 at its new Pasco office.