Hearing Loss LIVE! Talks Crowdfunding

Hearing Loss LIVE! is a all woman-owned small business. We used our savings to fund our first year, knowing payoff is going to some years away. We don't want the banks to tell us what we should be doing. We don't want a board telling us what we should be doing.

We want YOU to tell us what you need more of. And we want YOU to join us in uniting the hard of hearing community voice so we all have better communication outcomes.

We want to dive into the emotional and mental health of hearing loss. We want to add more classes for HoHs and their hearing partners. We want get business leaders in the KNOW!

Help us fund 2023. Help us grow Hearing Loss LIVE! And together we can be a proactive voice of change for those struggling with hearing loss.

Transcript

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Hearing Loss LIVE! talks crowdfunding.

Julia: 0:03

Hey, folks, welcome to Hearing Loss LIVE! We know it's the holidays, and there's lots going on. But we wanted to talk to you today about crowdfunding. As you know, Hearing Loss LIVE! is a business model, we have chosen to bootstrap it on purpose. Small business loans are great. It would give us a wonderful payroll, of course, but the obligations we felt weren't what we wanted to take on. Because our goal is to keep services as friendly, as free, as accommodating as possible to those with hearing loss, their friends, their family, their partners, their mployers-- I'm sorry, the dog might bark here in a minute, I apologize. But to do this, we need your help. So we'd like to crowdfund 2023. We've chosen an online business. You have many different ways to participate or send your employers to us. It keeps the expenses down. But we would like to start seeing in-service program providing for companies. Where we go out in the community and offer CEUs, continuing education units. We know a lot of people we partner with offers some of those CEUs, ours are a little different. But they are great classes, right? We want to be able to do things like hire a web designing company to help us freshen up the web, very small expense, but just that timeframe for Chelle and I to put into workbooks, workshops, new classes to roll out to you guys and keep those prices down. That's an awesome way for us to have time for our love and passion, and rollout a great webpage. We'd like to travel to support groups, right? SayWhatClub, Hearing Loss Association of America's national conference, adult-- Association of Late Deafened Adults. We like to do all of that and have what's called a coffee tour. We're still working through how that might look. But we want our mission, which is to empower you with better communication outcomes to keep moving forward. And so we're asking for your help with this. We will apply for grants again this next year as well. But if you are looking for a way to unite our community, our hearing loss community, we hope you would join us and help crowd fund us. So like give me some of your thoughts because I know, of course, just jabbering.

CHelle: 3:14

That's fine, you had all good things to say. And I agree with all of it. We are here for communication access, that's kind of going to be our focus now. It is communication for the hard of hearing, and their hearing partners. It takes two so we have to educate both people to improve communication strategies. Too often with hearing loss, we have communication breakdowns and isolate. And we all know that isolation is not good. And I've met in the past partners who have stopped talking, because it just got too hard with one of them having a profound or severe hearing loss. We want to, oh, how do I say it? We want to improve those communication lines. Give them the strategies and tools they need to keep going. I mean, it's really sad to see couples like that, and I don't want that to happen to anybody, which is why we're here. This isn't just couples. This is between friends, and employers and employees at work. This improves communication all the way around. When we learn how to advocate for communication needs, everything improves, but there's so little access to that improvement and that's our focus is communication. We also want to clear up some misconceptions with family, with friends, with coworkers and employee/employers. Let's clear up some of the misconceptions like the hard of hearing us American Sign Language Interpreters. It's not true. Most of us you will need captions instead. Another misconception is, captions or CART, communication access real time translation costs too much, it really doesn't. It's, you know, about the same level as ASL Interpreting. We need to make our communication needs known. I'm gonna. I'm saying that over and over again. So I will stop here now let Julia go.

Julia: 5:55

No, I agree, we need to make our communication needs known. We need to-- I mean, on our Buy Me a Coffee, we broke out, you know, one of our wish list is to have you guys help us fund like captioning. It really isn't a huge cost. It is part of doing business, we understand that and we we will fund it no matter what. Because we do find it so important. But we find that companies don't understand how important it is. And we know there's a shortage, we get it. But there's lots of different ways to educate people on how to employ captioning companies. And we, we help to support that by offering live captioning at our events. We're not-- trying to figure out a political way to say this, we're not going to be an organization. You want to be a member buy a Patreon or Buy Me a Coffee, with our extended information. What we want you to do is join us in a movement that will help further education for those with hearing loss. You know, we want the community to get stronger with their voice. I think that's always been our mission from the beginning. And one of those is by having equal access to communication. In every aspect. We have our home environment, our work environment, our public environment. And we need to let our needs known. We're not asking for hundreds of thousands of dollars, I think we're asking right around 6000. That's web design, CART for our workshops allows us the time to build and approach companies for CEU credits, which we'll be rolling out at the first of the year. It helps us to have time to offer classes. We do charge for classes, we have to, but we try to do everything possible to give you as great a discount as as we can. We actually have yet to pay ourselves with the classes, we have actually been rolling that back into our business. So that we can keep offering you guys classes. So every little bit helps us. We hope to get a couple of grants this year as well. That would be super awesome. That would take a lot of the pressure off of us. So if you've got a great grant idea, please let us know. We hope to have some shops on Amazon, some workbook type material before first quarter is over, so watch for those. But anyway, you can help us please do so. Chelle, some more thoughts.

Chelle: 9:06

Yeah, you mentioned fixing up the website. And that would help a great deal. We know our website needs to be updated. We need it to be easier to read. We-- I simply cannot learn how to design a website in the time that I need to fix it. We need it fixed up and I would love to learn website design but that would take me away from my passion which is hearing loss and communication. So the website, Yes. And the other one you mentioned, Oh CART, keeping our CART, showing people what CART is how it works. It's not not that expensive. If a little business can do it and, and we can like Julio said, we earn money from our classes or we're rolling it over into the business. There's no payoff. But you know, we hope to be sub, substainable here sometime in the future, near future. I do want to stress that hearing loss is a communication disorder. And we focus a lot on the hearing loss part of it, but not enough on the communication access part of it. I want people to know that they can't, I can't do my part if they don't do their part. And nobody knows this equation-- the equation? I'm not saying that right?

Julia: 10:48

Yep the equation and how it works both ways, right? You've got to both you've got to both know the communication

Chelle: 10:55

Yes, so businesses, coworkers, friends, and I can't rules. I agree. tell you how many friends I've lost in the past because of hearing loss and not being able to talk while on the phone. And their misunderstanding there. And me not knowing how to straighten that part out. Jobs, it's affected my jobs in the past, because I just didn't know how to advocate for myself, be proactive with my hearing loss. I do now. And I'm willing to share that with everybody in any way I can. Awesome.

Julia: 11:37

And hearing partners don't understand how important their role is. Whether it's your friend, your family, your employer, and employee/coworkers, they really do not understand. And service providers don't understand always. I, you know, we've said in the past, we'd like to emulate Deaf Culture, for hard of hearing, because they are very clear on their communication needs. And we need to know that, that support is there. It's a lot of being proactive, but you're proactive every day. So just-- let's be proactive together and grow. I kind of moved on to something else my timer went off. But what we hope is that you can help us this upcoming year, we'll have this on our YouTube station. And we will write a little bit about Buy Me a Coffee and how you can help us with our wish list. If you want more content we can it will be rolling out it is set up on Patreon. It's just a small one. But right now we'd really like to focus on getting CEU credits out to companies and offering workshops. So our time is gonna go there. Please help us. Again, Chelle and I are not web designers, we really could use help there. We'd really like to continue to offer CART, LIVE CART. So that's a great way to fund us. I'm sure we'll have some more if we meet our goals and keep moving forward and we hope to spend more and more time with Hearing Loss LIVE! so that we can get you in the KNOW and help those around you as well. Thanks for watching. Bye!