Multiple federal agencies awarded the National Deaf Center on Postsecondary Outcomes more than $24 million in grants, the College of Education announced in an Oct. 7 news release.

The National Deaf Center is a national technical assistance and dissemination center housed within UT’s College of Education. The recent grants include funding from the United States Department of Education’s Office of Special Education Programs and the department’s Rehabilitation Services Administration, as well as the National Institute on Disability and Independent Living and Rehabilitation Research.

“For the past 10 years, we’ve worked to improve the systems that shape deaf people’s opportunities to pursue education, training, and careers,” director Carrie Lou Bloom said.

The center went through a competitive process to secure the grants, supported by the College of Education’s research administration team, which helped the center request grant funding.

“Receiving three awards in the same funding cycle is a significant accomplishment for our team,” Bloom said. “It reflects years of work building the expertise, partnerships and infrastructure needed to take on these initiatives.”

College of Education Dean Daniel Hamlin said the grants will be a direct benefit to the campus and local deaf community.

“To be able to house the services and the expertise that the National Deaf Center has within the college here is really quite incredible,” Hamlin said.

The grants are broken up into three different awards and will continue through 2031. The largest award will go toward the center’s core work, which includes providing resources, individualized support, and partnerships with institutions to improve education and career pathways for the deaf community.

The second award supports a national interpreter training initiative, Beyond Access.

The third award supports Deafverse Career Connections, building on the existing Deafverse game, a choose-your-own-adventure game for deaf teenagers to learn important life skills.

“All three awards support the same mission, but in different ways,” Bloom said.

Bloom said the funding for the center’s core mission will amount to $20 million and the funding for Beyond Access will amount to $2.25 million, both over a five-year period, while the funding for Deafverse Career Connections will amount to $2.1 million over three years.

“What matters most to me is that we’re not simply continuing what we’ve already been doing,” Bloom said. “We’re using what we’ve learned to become more intentional about changing the systems that shape opportunities for deaf people.”