Striving to Be Our Best Selves: 5 Takeaways from SERID 2023

The banquet room in the Hilton Hotel at the University of North Carolina-Charlotte was absolutely packed to the rafters.

The annual meeting of SERID – The Southeast Regional Institute on Deafness – had drawn a huge number of people from across the country. With an original target of about 250 attendees, a record 400+ people registered and showed up for the weekend conference.

We were gathered in the basement room filled with round tables and three enormous video projection screens up front. The room was full of excitement to be together again — hands flying everywhere with people using a mixture of sign language, speech, and pro-tactile communication modalities. 

My heart was also full as I settled into my seat in the back of the room. I was there to see Duane Mayes give the opening keynote address for the conference.

Hailing from the great state of Alaska, Duane is a colleague and a friend, a tireless leader and advocate for deaf people both in his state and across the US. With a long and rich career serving disabled people, Duane is currently the Director of the Alaska Department of Labor and Workforce Development, Division of Vocational Rehabilitation. He is also the lead for the Deaf Professionals Network under the Council for State Agencies of Vocational Rehabilitation (CSAVR), which is where we got to know each other through our work on the Model State Plan. 

Duane’s keynote focused primarily on one thing: His family. As a CODA (child of deaf adults), Duane experienced firsthand both the deep love of the deaf community and the many challenges his parents experienced as he grew up.

Duane’s approach to the keynote was primarily a series of snapshots from his childhood and later into his adulthood. I’ll always remember the story about him flying home for his mother’s retirement party, there to interpret so that she could fully participate in a world of hearing people talking. Her eyes grew wide when her son surprised her and walked into the room. Turns out, she never understood what they were saying after 40 years, and on her last day, she finally got to tell them.

The tears in the room, both at that retirement party and in that ballroom, were full of grief and sadness. The people at the factory didn’t know what she or they were missing. But we know. The people at SERID seek to make sure that business owners, state leaders, and national policymakers also know. Deaf people deserve to belong.

Here are my five takeaways not only from Duane’s presentation but from the SERID 2023 experience as a whole.

• We are all living in stories. Sharing those stories and connecting through both our past and our present is what builds relationships and community. I’ve become much more comfortable in storytelling — not only in my own presentations but in my writing as well.

• Language access matters. Whether deaf, hard-of-hearing, deafblind, or late-deafened, language access is a non-negotiable. There are many ways to approach language access, and it is the cornerstone of opportunity at home, in school, and in the workplace. 

• Advocacy is embedded in what we do. Whether a teacher, a state program lead, a researcher, or a vendor, we all serve as advocates. There is too much at stake to consider access and opportunity for deaf people as anything more than a call to action.

• Each person has value. Our community is small, but each person has immense value. Maine lost four members of the deaf community to the mass shooting that weekend. Each of those members was mourned, honored, and grieved. 

• We can only do this together. Isolation is the enemy of progress, especially for members of the deaf community. Sharing information, offering moral support, and planning strategies for the next steps are best done together, knowing that we have each other’s backs. 

SERID 2023 was a reminder that there are deeply committed people who lead in the very challenging spaces of deaf education, vocational rehabilitation, and community advocacy. There are fewer staff and resources than ever, but there are also still deaf people who are striving every day to be their best selves.

Duane’s keynote ended with concrete recommendations on how to be strong, open, and compassionate leaders. He sent us out into the rest of the conference and into the world better equipped to meet those challenges — and better equipped to be our best selves.