Benjamin Gorman: Community ID want to train you for FREE! And no, there’s not a catch

It seems to me that even though we Deaf people have been ingrained with the notion that due to our deafness we are entitled to free/discounted things such as (admittedly invaluable) Freedom Passes, cinema tickets and queue jumping and then getting in nightclubs for a nominal fee, when we are offered free things, we immediately become suspicious!

In my role as a Project Coordinator for CommunityID, I am responsible for the Deaf and Interpreter Awareness (DIA) training that we provide (amongst other things) for FREE due to having funding from the wonderful Big Lottery. This training is available for charities, volunteer organisations, third sector or those who are working for the betterment of society.

For obvious reasons, we target mostly hearing organisations that may have deaf people working for them or have Deaf clients.

Most of the hearing organisations that we have trained have had no awareness of Deaf Culture, history and communication methods and have come away from the FREE training much more aware of the Deaf community out there. This is vital, due to the services that they cover such as Mental Health, Sexuality, the Elderly and, well, basically all the services that we deaf people, as citizens of the community as a whole, use in our every day lives.

Delivering the Interpreter Awareness part of the FREE training (where we train people on how to use interpreters – what to do with interpreters i.e. placements, code of ethics, clothing and all that) we noticed that Deaf people would benefit from this greatly due to a lack of awareness of bodies such as ASLI or NRCPD or qualifications that are required of Interpreters in order to call themselves a Registered Sign Language Interpreter (RSLI).

So we set out to contact and arrange FREE training for Deaf organisations and whilst some has been well received, there have been some instances where even though I drop in the word FREE in nearly every sentence, the Deaf person keeps asking: “Yeah, but what’s in the small print? What would we have to do? What do you want in return?”

What do we want? We want the chance to train you for FREE! FREE! FREE!

We’ve got a pool of six trainers (some of them my fellow PTLLS course students, courtesy of Big Lottery funding), and we are all ready to get out there and provide this FREE training. So if you are wondering what ASLI, NRCPD, CPD or RSLI stand for, it may be a good time to get your organisation to contact us to take advantage of this FREE and invaluable training!

For more details on the FREE training, email me at project@communityid.co.uk

I do hope that the above article has dispelled the idea of FREE training being offered by CommunityID as being something other than FREE!