Challenge to experience a life of silence

July 18th, 2013

A Tasman District Councillor will become deaf for a day, and is challenging Motueka community leaders to join here to raise money and see what living is like for deaf people.

On Friday August 2nd Councillor Judene Edgar will be taking part in the inaugural Silent Leadership Challenge, a hearing loss challenge for corporate and community leaders to raise awareness and funds for The National Foundation for the Deaf.

Throughout the day Judene will undertake four challenges - one-to-one meeting, team meeting, social get-together and watching TV at home - while wearing ear protectors to simulate deafness, robbing her of her full ability to communicate.

This is a daily reality for one in six New Zealanders who are deaf or hearing impaired.

By experiencing hearing impairment for a day, challenge participants will be part of a campaign to change attitudes and improve the quality of life for deaf and hearing impaired New Zealanders.

Judene is Chair of Accessibility for All (A4A), a community led Nelson-Tasman regional forum. "Accessibility is all about our ability to engage with, use, participate in, and belong to, the world around us," she says.

"It's something that you mightn't even consider on a day-today-day basis. However for too many people, access to education, employment and the community can be difficult and limited. Accessibility isn't just about disability, it's a universal need."

Participants in the Silent Leadership Challenge will be raising funds to support the National Foundation for the Deaf's current priority projects:

Protecting the hearing of our children and grandchildren through our Safe Sound Indicator project.
Supporting families with children who have Auditory Processing Disorder and are denied funding for special hearing aids. They're left to choose between paying themselves, or seeing their children's learning suffer.
Advocating for the fair funding of hearing aids for a generation of older people who lost their hearing at work.
Supporting hundreds of people each month through support services, responding to calls and emails for help, information and empathy.

For more information about the Silent Leadership Challenge go to this website. To sponsor Judene and help raise money for the National Foundation for the Deaf go to the Silent Leadership Challenge website.

Comment by Shirley Frater:
[Posted 19 July 2013]

As we have a 95% deaf grandson in Cairns who has been fortunate to have had cochlia implants and very supportive parents, all the best Judene. A deaf child is a big challenege for parents and family but thanks to the wonderful invention by an Australian doctor our grandson and others can talk, hear, communicate and have an almost normal life. It would be great if more implants could be afforded to people in NZ. The world of silence can be a lonely place ...

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