My Leadership in Action (LiA) experience has been extremely rewarding and a success in fulfilling its aims.
Towards the end of my LiA, I have had the pleasure of supporting the NDC in hosting their summer activities for underrepresented youth, including deaf children. These summer activities included a trip to Northumberlandia, a knife crime awareness workshop, a first aid workshop, a trip to St Paul’s monetary, hearing guide dogs for deaf people, and BSL for families. I consider this to have been a very important aspect of my LiA experience, as it allowed me to take on a leading role at these summer activities, encouraging children to learn important life skills, gain world curiosity, and have fun.
Coming out of these summer activities, I had the task, alongside other staff members, of promoting our summer activities and also the NDC on our newly created social media. This is an especially important task since the NCD's social media needed to be updated and to have a professional look. When addressing this with my team, we redesigned the logo for our Instagram page, and following each summer activity, we would make a post demonstrating the fun and informative nature of our events. This is also crucial for funding, as it demonstrates to funders the important work being done at the centre.
Alongside these summer event activities, the team at the centre has begun working on creating a website for the Deaf Centre. Part of this preparation has included attending several meetings, which also particularly highlighted the lessons which I have learned and continue to learn from being immersed in Deaf culture. I say this because these meetings have included plans to translate some of the website into BSL, and the dilemma of choosing between a human translator or AI (naturally, AI would be overlooked by a person). I am very thankful that by immersing myself in the NDC, I gained nuanced insight and understanding that the issue is not as simple as choosing between a preference for human communication or a preference for technology. Instead, I have come to acknowledge so many factors at play affecting this decision process, including lack of availability for human translators, the related costs, the work prospects of human translators, the shortage of interpreters, the lack of BSL resources at school, and preparing the Deaf community for an increasingly AI world.
At the end of my LiA, I had a lovely opportunity to sit down with the team to discuss and reflect on my time volunteering. It was a very lovely goodbye, and it allowed me to learn a lot about myself, the Deaf community, and working in the charity sector. My time volunteering at the NDC has had a large impact on me and has now implanted a strong desire to become a teacher of the deaf in the future, and to continue supporting the NDC through volunteering in my 3rd year, and helping to continue creating strong bonds with organisations. including Durham University and Laidlaw.
I have enjoyed my LiA at the NDC and am excited to be coming back next year to make some noise!