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The Massachusetts Commission for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing is statutorily charged with providing information and assistance to deaf, hard of hearing, and deaf-blind residents of the Commonwealth.
In 2001, MCDHH determined that there was no facility in the Commonwealth that could train caregivers in how to assist deaf elders who communicate through ASL and thus constitute a recognized linguistic minority.
The Commission, which for eight years has been level-funded or under-funded, had no budget for such a facility. Chaddsford Planning Associates,LLC, under its existing contract with MCDHH, wrote and managed a grant proposal to the federal government to raise the money to open the training and care facility.
Working with MCDHH, the Office of Elder Affairs, and the non-profit New England Home for the Deaf, we developed a marketing strategy to persuade the federal Administration on Aging to fund the project under the Older Americans Act. Our strategy involved the following: 1) demonstrating need; 2) positioning deaf elders as a linguistic minority; and 3) showing that the proposed Caregiver Resource Center could serve as a national demonstration project for the care of deaf elders.
We executed this strategy through a proposal that we wrote and managed. The key was ensuring that every section of the proposal spoke to a common theme: That this was a special and growing population that suffered linguistic isolation and depravation in contravention of the Older Americans Act, and that the situation could not be remedied without federal intervention.
In November 2001, the Commonwealth was awarded $158,000 in seed money to build the Caregiver Resource Center at the New England Home for the Deaf, with a potential for total funding of $1.05 million for this national demonstration project.
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