Deafblind World workshop for Greater Western Water, 11th February 2025

Greater Western Water is a large business that provides important services to our community and employs many staff. We are delighted to be booked by GWW to help their staff learn about deafblindness. On Tuesday 11th February 2025, we delivered our third on-site Deafblind World workshop for 17 GWW staff members.

Three deafblind presenters – Alison Rawson, Jackie Sciberras and Heather Lawson – worked together to lead an experiential activity, and shared information about deafblind communication, technology, personal life stories and more. Each of the three Deafblind presenters has a different story of becoming deafblind, and a different type of communication,  demonstrating the diversity of the deafblind experience.

Thank you Greater Western Water for your ongoing interest in the Deafblind community over three years! It has been great to meet so many of your staff at the workshops. Thank you interpreters for these events too. Without interpreters, we could not make this happen.

We hope the awareness that participants gained is spread further. We would love to provide more workshops to other organisations and increase our visibility in the community.

Here is a short video with feedback from a participant (transcript below):

TRANSCRIPT

Heather: I’m very pleased to meet you! Thank you for coming to the Deafblind World workshop. What were your thoughts? What did you learn?

Participant: The first thing I learned was how much thought and planning goes into navigating the world when you’re deafblind. There are so many different ways to get information, but you are limited in how you can do that, so you have to really think about how you get around. You can’t see or hear as well, and everything is going on around you at a quick pace, and it’s overwhelming, from what I can tell.

Heather: Thanks for explaining that. I’m pleased that you learned a lot! All the best.

Feedback from participants:

“Glad that I participated in this program. Enlightened by the activities we participated in, and with the information provided by the session.”

“It’s so important that we make our service accessible!”

“Understanding resources and practices to promote deafblind inclusion both personally and in the workplace.”

“How wonderful, brave and intelligent the presenters and the support people are. To make the most out of life no matter what and teaching the world that difference is beautiful.”

“Deafblind people are very capable people and have their own perspective and experience to add to society.”

“Thank you for all you do it is truly wonderful work and important. Excellent, I would highly recommend this session.”

“It was very powerful hearing your stories and the experiences. Thank you.”