HANDS AND VOICES STORY
They resented what they perceived to be the exclusionary nature of Silent America’s point of view. Controversy rolled across the land. Both camps fired off angry letters towards each other, and the Smithsonian exhibit planners. In the end, the Smithsonian scrapped the whole project. Regardless of what side any one was on, we all lost that battle.
As individuals who are in so many ways connected to each other through deafness or hearing loss professionally, parentally, or otherwise we’d had an opportunity to rally around the things that unite us and really show the whole world, but instead we burned ourselves out in the same old heated arguments over communication methodology. Those events led to the establishment of Hands & Voices. We have been an established chapter of this national organization since September of 2006.