HASA at Baltimore Center Stage
The world premiere play Richard & Jane & Dick & Sally features Sally, a deaf character played by Treshelle Edmond who learns to sign against the wishes of her hearing father. In the interests of expanding access and inclusion in the arts, we have partnered with HASA.
HASA, formerly known as the Hearing and Speech Agency, is one of Baltimore’s oldest non-profit organizations. Their mission is to connect people to their worlds to build a society where everyone can understand and be understood. With their community-based programming focusing on the areas of education, hearing health, inclusion, language access, and speech-language, they help more than 4,000 children and adults communicate more effectively each year. Here is just a small sampling of the plethora of ways they make this happen:
Community Initiatives
Deaf Awareness & Culture
- You can book a Deaf Awareness Workshop through HASA in which you learn how to communicate with Deaf individuals effectively, understand how to work with an interpreter, and learn from a Deaf educator who can answer all of your specific questions from personal experience!
Hearing Screenings
- HASA’s Community Engagement Team provides free hearing screenings for community groups such as schools, community centers, churches, and more.
Sign Language Classes: In the Comfort of Your Own Space
- HASA has offered sign language classes for twenty years. They can customize classes for groups of students who might be interested in learning at their own office, community center, etc. They even offer a onetime 90-minute workshop that provides a basic intro… that’s completely free!
Hearing Hospitality Training
- Hearing Hospitality is an education and training program designed to help restaurant managers, hosts, servers, and kitchen staff accommodate guests who are hard of hearing. HASA conducts training workshops at participating restaurants to educate staff on the challenges individuals may face and to share practical service tips for creating an inclusive dining experience.
Interpreting
- For more than 30 years, HASA has connected individuals by scheduling reliable, high quality interpreting services.
Therapy
- HASA has speech-language pathologists and audiologists certified by the American Speech-Language-Hearing-Association (ASHA) to provide speech therapy for the 10% of adults and children living with a speech-language disorder or delay.
HASA has so many different programs and initiatives, sharing them all would make one incredibly long blog post! For more information about who they are and what they do, make sure to check out their literature in the Library (in the Roche Chapel on the 4th Floor) when you come see Richard & Jane & Dick & Sally. You can also find more on their website.
We’re so grateful for this partnership and will continue to strive to expand access and inclusion in the arts!