The mission of the Hearing and Speech Center of Northern California is to provide life-long professional services to support all people with hearing or communication challenges in achieving their goals.

Over the last year, the Hearing and Speech Center has seen thousands of clients, some only once for a hearing test, for example, and others have come to us daily to attend our school. Our staff made hundreds of visits to hospitals, community centers, senior centers and schools to create access to care and services. While our greatest accomplishment is always the improvement in quality of life or opportunities for our clients, we did make developments in our work in the last year that we are proud of. Such developments include a tracking system for infants and children who have hearing evaluations at our center. This system allows us to make sure that we reach out to the families of children with a diagnosis of hearing loss. Our counselors can then provide guidance and support to the parents. Among our strengths is the ability to bring together a community of individuals, and this year, our parent-teacher group took off and coordinated three fundraising events to raise funds and awareness about the work of the center. Our audiologists, besides providing excellent professional services, reached out to the wider community to offer consumer education on hearing aids to help people understand the background of hearing aid manufacturing, marketing and sales, and how to be sure that they will benefit from their purchase. Finally, staff from all departments came together to create a new program called FACES (Family, Audiologist, Counselor, Educator, and Speech Therapist). This program will begin in the coming year and is designed to create a team of professionals for families of newly diagnosed infants and children. The team will work together to educate the family and help them prepare for the years ahead.