Our Cause

Message from Dallas Hearing Foundation President, B. Robert Peters M.D.

The Dallas Hearing Foundation would like to extend an invitation to attend the 2018 Fundraising Event benefiting the Dallas Hearing Foundation. Your presence and financial contributions will give the gifts of hearing and speech to children and adults with hearing loss. The Dallas Hearing Foundation is a 501c3 non-profit organization that supports all aspects of hearing services: medical, rehabilitative, education, counseling, and research. Priority is given to children who do not have insurance or other financial resources. Through DHF, these precious children receive hearing aids, cochlear implants, auditory-verbal therapy, educational services, and counseling. Our specialized team consists of an otologic surgeon, audiologists, a speech-language pathologist, an educational consultant, and a psychologist. With the services we provide, children and adults with hearing loss can pursue their own interests and dreams, rather than being restricted in a world of silence with severe limitations on their educational and employment opportunities.

The Dallas Hearing Foundation individualizes each child’s treatment and provides the extraordinary attention needed to optimize their potential to hear, speak, and receive a quality education. We have children in our program that were born profoundly deaf and yet are being educated with their hearing peers in mainstream schools after receiving cochlear implants and auditory-verbal therapy. Mainstreaming deaf children into regular classrooms saves the public school system up to $200,000 per child during K-12 education.

In 2017 we faced a significant backlog of beneficiary requests for assistance because in the prior year the number of individuals who looked to DHF for help exceeded the funds available. I am happy to report that our sponsors and donors responded with great generosity so that we have been able to fulfill these requests. This is the most encouraging development of 2017 for those involved with DHF. We pray that this level of support will enable us to do even more in 2018 and 2019.

The sources for this increase in demand are numerous, but include changes to our national healthcare system including developments in our Medicaid system. Unfortunately, the problem of providing care for the hearing impaired of all ages will likely worsen in the coming years as healthcare resources are redistributed. DHF will have a bigger gap to fill.

Many lives have been profoundly changed by the services provided by the Dallas Hearing Foundation. Our goal is to be able to give the miracle of hearing and speech to every deaf child and adult who needs our assistance. Please help us to assist these deserving individuals through our main fundraising event. Only you can forever change the life of a deaf person. We are so proud of the past assistance we have been able to provide to this community, of the present help we are currently providing, and hope to be able to service even more individuals in need in the future.

On behalf of the deaf children and adults who are waiting for a miracle, thank you for your time and consideration.

With Sincere Appreciation,
B. Robert Peters, M.D.
President, Dallas Hearing Foundation

Facts about the Dallas Hearing Foundation

Formed in 1997 as a 501(c)(3) charitable foundation which provides cochlear implants, hearing aids, auditory-verbal therapy, and educational support services based on financial need.
DHF has provided over $1 million in services to improve the lives of individuals with hearing loss.
DHF has held a successful fund raising event every year since 2001.

Facts about Deafness

There are 36 million individuals with hearing loss in the United States.
Four thousand children are born with hearing loss each year.
90% of children with hearing loss are born to normal hearing parents.
Parents with normal hearing communicate through speaking, and most do not know how to use sign language to communicate with their deaf child.
Deaf education programs in the public schools usually teach some form of sign language in order to communicate with and educate the students. As a result, few deaf students become proficient in the English language.
An average reading level of 3rd grade is typical of graduates of deaf education programs in the U.S.
45% of deaf individuals do not graduate from high school and only 5% graduate from college.
A small minority of deaf students complete deaf education programs prepared for independence in adulthood; 60% face either unemployment or severe underemployment.
Deaf individuals earn only 50% to 70% of what their hearing peers earn, losing an average of $320,000 in earnings during their lifetime.
Over 50% of deaf adults earn less than $25,000 per year.
42% of deaf adults between 18 to 44 years of age are unemployed.
70% of deaf individuals rely on government insurance programs such as Medicaid and Medicare.
Deafness is the most costly single disability in terms of special education costs, averaging $25,000 per year per child, compared to $5,100 for a normal hearing child.
The average lifetime cost to society of a child born deaf in terms of medical, educational, and productivity losses is $1,020,000.

Facts about Cochlear Implants

A cochlear implant is a small, complex electronic device that helps provide a sense of sound to a person who is profoundly deaf or severely hard of hearing. The implant consists of an external portion that sits behind the ear and a second portion that is surgically placed under the skin (see figure). An implant is comprised of a microphone which picks up sound, a speech processor which selects and arranges sounds, a transmitter and receiver/stimulator which receives signals from the speech processor and converts them into electric impulses, and an electrode array which collects the impulses from the stimulator and sends them to different regions of the auditory nerve.

An implant does not restore normal hearing, but it can give a deaf person a functional representation of sounds in the environment and aid in the understanding of speech.

Research has shown cochlear implants to be one of the most cost-effective medical treatments of our day, far greater than coronary bypass surgery or kidney dialysis.
Children with at least two years of cochlear implant experience are placed in mainstream normally hearing classrooms at twice the rate of deaf children without implants. This saves the education system up to $200,000 in cost from first through twelfth grade.
It costs $40,000 dollars to implant one child during infancy to the age of three years. Statistics show that for every one dollar spent on cochlear implants, society saves $25 in specialized services. This calculates to $1 million in savings per child implanted.