Board of Directors and Staff
Carole Willans: President
President
| 25 Des Rapides Street Gatineau, QC J8T 5K2 |
Tel: 819-243-8382 Fax: 613-941-4165 E-mail: president@chha.ca |
Carole is a hard of hearing lawyer and long-time advocate for persons who are hard of hearing or deafened. She has a profound bilateral hearing loss, the result of a household accident at the age of four. Carole has been involved in the Canadian Hard of Hearing Association since 1990, during which she served as the Executive Director (1991), a Board Member (for many years), and as the French editor of Listen/écoute magazine since its inception in 1991. She has been actively involved in most CHHA committees at some time or other, notably the Bylaws Committee, the Captioning Committee, the Human Rights/Legal Committee and the Francophone Committee. She has been often called upon to represent CHHA in various venues, particularly in federal government departments and agencies. Carole also served as Treasurer of the Canadian Hard of Hearing Association Foundation for two years.
In addition, Carole is an advocate for persons with disabilities in general, particularly in the federal workplace. She is one of the founding members of the National Committee of Federal Public Servants with Disabilities. In the context of her own workplace, the Department of Justice Canada, Carole was a Counsellor in the Criminal Law Policy Sector for 11 years, and recently obtained a new position as a Counsellor with the Outreach and Partnerships Initiative. She voluntarily took responsibility for chairing the Deputy Minister's Advisory Committee of Persons with Disabilities for several years, and when she stepped down from that position she was asked to provide leadership for a Working Group on Accommodations. This was presented to the Deputy Minister of Justice with a detailed report on how to streamline the Department's response to requests for accommodation by employees with disabilities in November, 2003.
Carole now feels that it is time to take on new responsibilities by enhancing her involvement with CHHA, "the people who accept me completely just the way I am!" Her well-known by-line is "the only true deafness is that of the heart".
Read the President's Message.