I’m back home after five amazing days in Oregon for the 2012 Hands & Voices Leadership conference.
We started off with our board meeting:
Hands & Voices has grown from four chapters to chapters around the world.
We opened the evening with a team building exercise to see who could build the tallest tower out of noodles and tape, with a marshmallow on top. Hilarious fun!
The conference was located next to the beautiful Columbia River in Hood River, Oregon. Breathtaking!
There are times when my heart gets tired of “battles” among communication choices and the constant advocacy which comes from this field. But at the Hands & Voices conference, my eyes settled on a three-month old baby in the arms of her parents–one look, and passion and purpose comes flooding back. If we can support just one family on this journey, we have given back.
Today, I’m up at Christie Lake, surrounded by five teenage boys. Four of them in this picture are students from Rochester Institute of Technology. All four are from different educational backgrounds and experiences. They’re the results of the “choices” we make as families raising deaf and hard of hearing children. But as I watched the boys crack jokes, laugh and talk about everything under the sun, I realize the bottom line– as parents, professionals and deaf/hard of hearing adults in the Hands & Voices family, it comes down to the same thing: we all want happy, well-adjusted kids.
And it’s so much easier to navigate the journey with the support of one another.