Champions of inclusion come together as the Oscar M. Lopez Center partners with Connected Women, a social impact startup which provides online skills development and remote work opportunities for women.

Carolyn Dagani, the Deaf project lead of OML Center’s project “Climate Resilience of the Deaf: Signs for Inclusive Governance and Development” (Project SIGND), her co-lead Perpi Tiongson, and Connected Women founder Gina Romero announced their research collaboration last month at Project SIGND’s celebration of International Day of Sign Languages held at the Rockwell Business Center in Pasig City.

For two years now, Project SIGND’s team of Deaf and hearing persons have been working on a pioneering project that would help the Deaf community to be prepared and able to adapt to the risks and disasters that come with climate change.

An important component of the project is the development of 51 Filipino Sign Language (FSL) signs that convey climate change-related concepts. Deaf researchers also traveled around the country to collect sign language vocabulary, starting with 6,050 signs, 1,039 of which have the potential to represent 26 climate change concepts.

These new signs, along with beginner-friendly lessons about climate change, shall be disseminated to Deaf communities and other stakeholders with the view of improving the state of climate discourse to make it more Deaf-inclusive. 

Both the new signs and the collected ones will also be kept in a sign bank, which will be available on an online data portal in early 2025. 

Through the “Track FSL Initiative”, OML Center will engage with Connected Women as the latter leverages its capabilities in data collection and analysis to gather and analyze climate-related conversations in FSL while collaborating with the Deaf to ensure that their unique perspectives are represented in discussions on climate action and resilience.

It is hoped that through the course of the research collaboration, Connected Women will be able to monitor an improvement in these conversations about climate change among the Deaf due to Project SIGND’s work.

“Before meeting Connected Women, we just really needed someone to help track climate conversations online, especially those that use the FSL corpus on climate change of the Project,” said Tiongson. “But upon learning of how Connected Women tapped into the digital space to become an empowering mechanism for including the underrepresented, it sounded too good a possibility to explore if it could not only help meet a service requirement but also enhance the adaptive capacity of the Deaf through livelihood opportunities.”

Dagani, meanwhile, sees the collaboration as another initiative where Deaf and hearing people can work alongside each other. This is the kind of partnership that she hopes to see more of, and is a step towards breaking down the barriers that the Deaf community faces.

For her part, Romero said Connected Women’s vision “has always been centered on inclusivity, especially for those historically left behind.” 

“Our broader vision is to ensure that all of our programs are inclusive. We see Elevate DADA—Data Analysis for Deaf Action—as the first step in improving accessibility across all of our initiatives, empowering everyone to benefit from the digital economy,” she added.

Connected Women already provides online skills development and remote work opportunities for women. The Track FSL Initiative will allow them to expand their work on inclusion by increasing their organization’s awareness and sensitivity of the Deaf community. 

OML Center hopes the partnership ultimately provides livelihood opportunities for Deaf individuals who can be trained in digital skills and become part of Connected Women’s talent pool. 

By providing them with the means to earn a living, the Deaf individuals’ climate resilience may be enhanced, as well.

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Project SIGND is a two-year grant mobilized through the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) Funding for Disability-Inclusive Climate Action (DCA). The grant is implemented under the larger project umbrella of the Investing in Sustainability and Partnerships for Inclusive Growth and Regenerative Ecosystems (INSPIRE) project administered by the Gerry Roxas Foundation.

OML Center’s partners in implementing Project SIGND are the Philippine Federation of the Deaf, Parabukas, Filipino Sign Language National Network, Deaf Disaster Assistance Team-Disaster Risk Reduction, Dumaguete Effata Association of the Deaf, and Deaf Accessibility Network of the Philippines.