LEALMAN, Fla. \u2014 The Pinellas County Deaf Collaborative hosted the fifth annual Deaf Fest Saturday in Lealman, bringing resources for people who are deaf or hard of hearing together in one location.<\/p>\n
The event included about 25 organizations that offered services such as health screenings, employment help and hurricane preparedness information.<\/p>\n
Whitney Goodnight attended with her two children to improve her American Sign Language skills.<\/p>\n
\u201cI am here to get a better understanding and kind of deep dive into the deaf culture,\u201d Goodnight said.<\/p>\n
Goodnight said she began learning ASL years ago and started practicing it consistently again this year.<\/p>\n
\u201cI want to learn the language because I think it\u2019s a beautiful language. It\u2019s a very visual language,\u201d Goodnight said. \u201cAnd to get to understand how beautiful that language is, you need to understand the people behind it.\u201d<\/p>\n
John Miller, executive director of the Family Center on Deafness, said one of the biggest challenges in the deaf community is knowing which sources of information can be trusted.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is housed at where FCD, Family Center on Deafness, is,\u201d Miller said. \u201cSo, they\u2019re familiar with this area, and they know that this is a safe place to come to, and these are great agencies like Pinellas County, like JWB, like St. Anthony\u2019s Hospital, those type of things that are trusted.\u201d<\/p>\n
Goodnight said she is also teaching ASL to her 6- and 9-year-old children.<\/p>\n
\u201cI started like when they were babies,” she said. “I would do little signs like more and eat and things like that, but then it fell off. But they\u2019re excited to be learning.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"LEALMAN, Fla. \u2014 The Pinellas County Deaf Collaborative hosted the fifth annual Deaf Fest Saturday in Lealman, bringing…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":373066,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[767,274,28,115,596,202,204,203,199,201,200,135,278,1374,835],"class_list":["post-373065","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-st-petersburg","tag-app-community","tag-app-top-stories","tag-florida","tag-news","tag-pinellas-county","tag-st-pete","tag-st-pete-headlines","tag-st-pete-news","tag-st-petersburg","tag-st-petersburg-headlines","tag-st-petersburg-news","tag-tampa","tag-top-stories","tag-tyler-oneill","tag-vod"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/373065","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=373065"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/373065\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/373066"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=373065"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=373065"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=373065"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}