Meet the Founder
Heather Dover Founder & Executive Director, Hear to Sign
"Hear to Sign grew out of a simple, undeniable truth: Deaf-parented homes have unique, beautiful, and complex stories, yet mainstream support systems rarely know we exist. We aren't just collecting data—we are building a foundation of research, mental health resources, and validation that our community has needed for generations."
Some questions stay with you until you do something about them.
I didn’t set out to start a nonprofit—I just started with questions. Questions about my childhood, about other CODAs (Children of Deaf Adults), and why experiences that felt completely normal to me growing up started looking so different once I viewed them through an adult lens.
I was raised by my profoundly Deaf mother. Growing up, I didn’t spend much time analyzing what it meant to be a CODA; I was just my mom’s daughter. Sign language was normal. Moving between Deaf and hearing spaces was normal. Helping out with communication was normal. It was simply my life, and that upbringing gave me strengths I wouldn’t trade for anything.
As I got older, though, I started looking back at certain memories differently. Not with anger or resentment toward my mom, and certainly not with blame toward the Deaf community—mostly, I just became curious. Was my childhood unique, or did other CODAs grow up doing the exact same things? Were there responsibilities we carried that felt normal simply because we didn’t know any different? What did other CODAs love about growing up the way we did, what was difficult, and what helped?
Eventually, one main question wouldn't leave me alone: Why don’t we know more?
I grew up watching my mom navigate a world that expected her to adapt far more often than it was willing to adapt to her. When that world wasn’t accessible, we figured it out—because that’s what families do. If someone couldn’t communicate with my mom, I stepped in. If a hearing person didn’t know what to do, their attention naturally shifted to the kid standing next to her. At the time, none of that felt extraordinary.
It wasn’t until much later that I realized that some of those responsibilities never belonged on a child's shoulders in the first place. They belonged to schools that should have provided access, healthcare systems that should have supplied qualified interpreters, and institutions that should have known how to communicate directly with a Deaf adult. The problem wasn’t that I had a Deaf mother or that she had a hearing child. The problem was that systemic gaps repeatedly left families like ours to fill in the blanks.
Eventually, my questions stopped being about me. I started thinking about the full spectrum of CODAs—the ones who interpreted constantly and the ones who rarely did; those immersed in Deaf culture and those who weren't; people who describe their childhoods as incredible, those who found them painful, and those who'd say, "Honestly, I've never really thought about it."
I wanted to understand all of it, not to prove my experience was universal, but because I realized it probably wasn't. What role did geography, socioeconomic status, access to interpreters, or generation play in how we turned out? Why did certain responsibilities make one person feel empowered and another feel completely overwhelmed?
My personal story couldn't answer those questions, which is why Hear to Sign starts with research.
I refuse to build an organization around my own assumptions of what CODAs need. I want us to ask, listen, and let CODAs share their lived experiences in their own words—even when, and especially when, those stories contradict one another. There isn't just one CODA story; there are thousands, and research gives us a way to spot the underlying patterns we haven't fully understood yet. I’m not interested in forcing data to fit a narrative; I want to discover what narrative the data actually tells us.
Data, however, is just the foundation. My hope is that what we learn will help us build better resources for CODAs and Deaf families, create better educational tools for therapists, teachers, and healthcare workers, and foster clearer boundaries around institutional responsibility.
Most importantly, I want this to lead to better communication within families. A parent and child can love each other fiercely and still experience the exact same moment in entirely different ways. Neither person is wrong; they just need a bridge to understand what that moment looked like from the other side.
The woman beside me in the photograph on this page is my mom. She isn’t here as an example of what Hear to Sign wants to fix—she’s the reason I care so much about changing things. Behind all the surveys, statistics, and reports, this organization has always been about real, complicated, loving families trying to understand each other better.
Hear to Sign grew out of the bond between a Deaf mother and her hearing daughter. My experience gave me the initial questions, but to find the answers, I need other CODAs, Deaf parents, and dedicated professionals to join the conversation. Hear to Sign began with one CODA’s story, but it was never meant to end there—it exists to make space for all of our stories and discover what becomes possible when every one of us is finally heard.
Heather Dover
Founder & Executive Director