Community of People

Self-help chapters provide an environment unique to those people who understand hearing loss and all of the issues that surround and pertain to it. Sharing, exchanging ideas and learning from each other are key tools for this group.

Hearing loss Stigma

Stigma implies a negative viewpoint, however overcoming and identifying steps available to bypass the business of titles will allow for moving in the right direction.

Legal Rights
Responsibilities

Understanding these will help us navigate through the consumer market as well as basic safety environments. It is better to be proactive and understand now, than wait until it may be too late.

Coping communication
Strategies

Daily life presents ongoing challenges that require ways that are not so exhaustive but can be safe and useful for all people with hearing loss. Communicating depends on what is given and received. Deciding specifically what is needed is our journey today.

Communicating with Others

Learning how to speak to others about what you need or don’t need requires a serious but necessary step to continue on your journey of healthy hearing. Joining others making this trek will help you learn the steps as others have done the same.

Supplementing your Hearing

Often hearing aids or implants are not enough to hear your way through the day or around your environments. Around a table, in a theatre, or even in places that are noisy require other devices that compliment your hearing devices. Learn about what will help you hear well.

Safety Needs

Making sure you are safe in any situation, requires that you know and share the latest information available for all people who have any degree of hearing loss. This applies for your personal safety as well as when you are out in the public sector.

Family Communications

Conversations with those who are near and dearest to you starts right at home. Understanding hearing loss and how to tune into communication with those immediately around you is paramount to being successful in hearing well.

Noisy Situations

Identifying any and all places that are noisy and are non-conducive to effective communication for people with hearing loss is the first step. Identifying ways to minimizing and working around these type of places will help you hear better with fewer interruptions.

Traveling

Effective communications while traveling can be accomplished when preliminary outreach and planning is completed and complimentary technology is utilized.

Empowerment

Exchange of information, knowledge, encouragement, and shared experiences with others having hearing loss, helps to build confidence, assurance and understanding about your own hearing loss. Invisibility no more.

Sharing our HLAA
Mission Statement

As Rocky Stone has shown us since the beginning, HLAA strives to give us the tools we need to live more successfully with hearing loss and to show WE DO NOT HAVE TO FACE HEARING LOSS ALONE.

History of our Chapter

By Eloise Schwarz, Steering Committee Leader 2020

This HLAA Chapter is over 14 years old. At that time many of our Chapter members met at the ‘church’ for this very special social club, as I have been told. Picture albums of those days show how they met and what they offered each other then. With our post-COVID advancements /restrictions, we offered Zoom™ platform options and a new way of communicating that at times made it difficult but also challenged those involved.

Our understanding of hearing loss and other diseases of the brain are more complex and deeper now than they were fourteen years ago. While there were basic hearing aids and cochlear implants then, very little was spoken of in research, legislation, or updated standards of practices. Demand for devices, consumerism, and insurance coverage is coming of age and rightly so since the statistics bear the evidence that support is needed NOW.

Our Chapter had been working to provide chapter meetings for those interested in attending by both the internet/broadband method, for those capable of doing this during the Pandemic, to meetings in person. Returning to our partnership with St Andrew Presbyterian Church, we held our meetings in Fellowship Hall where the Audio Loop System is installed. This accommodated those wearing hearing aids /cochlear implants with T-coils. Additionally, our chapter’s Clear Windowed Mask campaign provided over a thousand sewn masks for our community and beyond when it most mattered during the pandemic. Hospital Kits for residents and Emergency Communication Cards for our EMS providers were also distributed in our communities. Grant project covered Audio Loop for SCC Community Hall.

Wish List Items:

1) Funding Source for Captioning each Quarterly Chapter Meeting
2) Underwrite Chapter Brochure for Distribution – our community
3) Buddy system for updating hearing loops in Sun City Center
4) Campaign for chapter membership drive via Social Club