DEAFvibe Background

Rowan Robinson and Ali France, Founders of DEAFvibe are both profoundly deaf and use speech & BSL to communicate and have a full understanding of the frustrations and barriers that people with a hearing loss face in their daily lives. We also have a strong empathy with people that we meet on a regular basis.

We both have different backgrounds in our deafness, our family upbringing, the education systems we attended and our employment history.

We both realised we had the same passion in common – to improve the lives of Deaf, Hard of Hearing, Deafened and Deafblind people. We sat down one day and started to come up with ideas for the name for our group. Once we agreed on the name DEAFvibe and our philosophy “Deafness = Equality & Access = Fairness” we both knew that DEAFvibe was the start of something very exciting!

Our next task was to create a Board of Trustees of which we have a total of 7 committed members all of whom have a vast range of experience and expertise of their own personal experiences of deafness and / or working with Deaf, Hard of Hearing, Deafened and Deafblind people in Staffordshire and Stoke-on-Trent. We then set out exploring funding streams and identifying gaps & projects that were needed in in Staffordshire and Stoke- on-Trent consulting with a wide range of people.

Our successful bids have been a culmination of hard work and determination by the Board of Trustees to achieve positive outcomes for the needs of Deaf, Hard of Hearing, Deafened and Deafblind people.

After being involved with DEAFvibe for a number of years, due to personal reasons, Rowan sadly made the difficult decision to step down and pursue other interests.