In a world where communication is of utmost importance, one young leader is doing her part to help break the silence for the deaf community in Jamaica through her efforts to get more youth involved in sign language.

Final-year student at The University of the West Indies (The UWI) Zantaye Thomas, founder and executive director of Sign Clubs of Jamaica, started the youth organisation in March 2022 when she was a sixth form student at Campion College.

Sign Clubs of Jamaica, which is the first of its kind in the region, currently serves to unite sign language clubs in schools across Jamaica to collaborate their efforts to work together with members of the deaf community here.

Thomas explained that while serving as president of the sign language club at Campion, she was concerned that not many schools were involved in sign language at the club level. That encouraged her to start something of her own.

“I realised that unlike other school clubs there was no umbrella organisation for sign language clubs across the various schools in Jamaica which made it a bit difficult to inter club and collaborate among the sign language clubs and I knew that uniting the sign language clubs would allow for a greater impact on the Jamaican deaf community as it relates to outreach and service,” Thomas told the Jamaica Observer.

She said she had always wanted to create an association that allows for high schools with sign language clubs to collaborate under one entity as they learn and work to assist people and groups within the deaf community.

“I thought of the idea from lower school but I wasn’t sure about how to go about it, so when I was in upper school all I did was just post on my status and stories asking if anyone knew of schools who had a sign language club. After that, I got some responses and I just reached out to them and created a registration form and they registered and we made a group and that’s how it really started,” Thomas explained.

While emphasising the importance of collaboration, she noted that her main reason for starting Sign Clubs of Jamaica was what she saw as an urgent need to tackle marginalisation of the deaf community in Jamaica.

“We really want to highlight the deaf community because that is our main goal, it’s not about us but it’s about service and outreach to the deaf community. So one of the things we wanted to do is to highlight deaf entrepreneurs because one of the issues is unemployment in the deaf community,” Thomas explained.

“We do recognise that the deaf community faces some barriers within the Jamaican society and what we want to ensure is that if we tackle the interest of deaf culture and language from the youth point of view it would ensure that the trajectory of persons in society marginalising the deaf community changes,” she added.

She further explained that one of the issues affecting Jamaica is that there are not enough interpretors in the island which is a massive disadvantage as it relates to bridging communication barriers.

“By fostering the interest of deaf culture and deaf language from earlier levels of education that would ensure that the trajectory of not having enough interpretors in Jamaica would change eventually,” she said.

Despite starting Sign Clubs of Jamaica in 2022, Thomas recently held the official launch on September 27 this year under the theme: ‘Celebrating Deaf Culture, Impacting the Deaf Community through Service’.

She explained that one of the main purposes of the launch was to bring more attention to the work of the association and to get more people on board.

“We really wanted to have this launch so that all the schools in Jamaica know about us and can be a part of us so we can create a bigger impact on the deaf community. We want to partner with the Ministry of Education more which would allow us to receive more resources and more support. Having the support of the ministry would also allow more schools to feel more compelled to be a part of our youth organisation and would ensure collaboration between the Government and our organisation can take place,” she said.

Thomas acknowledged that she has big ambitions for Sign Clubs of Jamaica.

“We want to ensure that deaf culture and deaf language is known in every single school in Jamaica and in order to do that, we need more support so we can do bigger projects and have national impact so we can grow and develop as an organisation,” Thomas said.