By Chris Medeiros | Director of Operations
Season's Greetings and Happy Holidays from all of us on the Global Deaf Research Institute team! As the year comes to a close, there's an incredible amount of work to update you since our update this Summer. As always, thank you, from the bottom of our hearts, for your continued support. Without our GDRI donor community, this work wouldn't be possible. So, on to the update!
Deaf Community Research: Ecuador!
We are so excited to be wrapping up our first official longterm deployment of the Deaf Community Research initiative! Our team spent 3 months traveling around Ecuador, to deaf population centers located in Quito, Lago Agrio, Cuenca, Guayaquil, and Portoviejo to meet and connect with the deaf communities in these places. We received slightly above 300 responses to our national survey on the Social Determinants of Health for the deaf community and conducted focus group interviews with more than 100 participants!
Data collection ended the first week of December, and our team is already hard at work analyzing all of this gorgeous, gorgeous data! Over the next several weeks, we will begin to be able to produce insights and recommendations and soon, will have a white paper available presenting our findings.
Our next step is to return to the capital, Quito, so we can present our findings officially to our host organization, FENASEC, the National Federation of Deaf People of Ecuador. FENASEC has been heavily involved in our deployment of this community-lead initiative, along with the local Disability Rights organization, CONADIS (National Council for the Equality of Disabled People). They connected us with regional deaf organizations, spread the word about our research, supported us with office space, and opened doors that made our data collection phase a huge success.
After presenting our findings to FENASEC president Rodalfo Minchalo, we will be holding a townhall to present our findings to the Ecuadorian government so that we can show them evidence that the basic needs of this community are not adequately being met!
GDRI at Two International Conferences
People are starting to take notice of our work! GDRI was lucky to attend TWO regional conferences since this summer, the First Interregional Meeting of Urban Preparedness for Health Emergencies and Disasters Response and Recovery held by the PanAmerican Health Organization (a branch of the World Health Organization) in Quito, Ecuador in October, and the Regional Summit on Disability for Latin America and the Caribbean hosted by RIADIS (the Latin American Network of Disabled Organizations) in Rio de Janeiro in December, where GDRI was able to present preliminary findings from DCR: Ecuador! A huge thank you to Juan Angel de Gouveia, President of RIADIS for taking us under his wing and getting us entree to these two important events. Executive Director Lorne Farovitch met with the presidents of the national deaf organizations from Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Uruguay, Peru, Paraguay, and Venezuela, all of whom agreed to write letters of support for our organization to perform our needs assessment in their countries: this is huge! The invitation from the community is the all-important first step in our deployment process, which means work can get under way!
Giving Tuesday
A huge thank you to all of you who supported our Giving Tuesday campaign. Thanks to your support, we were able to raise a total of $3,453, including $698 in matching funds from GlobalGiving! We're so grateful to our community for turning out that day - thank you!
GDRI in 2025
As the year draws to a close, we're looking with excitement at what 2025 holds in store: we've begun work on our second deployment: DCR: Dominican Republic, as well as two large fundraising events in Los Angeles and New York. 2024 was a wild ride of a year, with so much to be grateful for and so much experience to learn from. We are committed to maintain and IMPROVING our efforts to support the global deaf comunity, and are lucky to have you along for the ride.
By Chris Medeiros | Director of Operations
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