Jo Deluzio

Director
Toronto
Board Member Since 2019

Jo(anne) DeLuzio has practiced as an audiologist in various facilities around the Greater Toronto Area for almost 36 years. In addition to her B.Sc. and M.Cl.Sc. (audiology) degrees from Western University, Jo holds a PhD from the university of Toronto in Speech-language pathology and has been teaching in that program for almost 20 years. Jo has had the opportunity to work in both the private and public sectors.

During her career she has had the privilege of working with literally thousands of people who are d/Deaf, deafened, and hard of hearing. She has learned to actively listen (Harder than it sounds. Audiologists are better talkers than they are listeners.) and learn from the stories of people’s journeys of living with hearing loss. She has concluded that hearing health care professionals need to stop thinking that their role is to assess and treat hearing and related disorders. Instead, they need to work in partnership with people to provide information and service that empowers them to make their own choices of how they want to navigate their world. Difficulty in communicating cannot be measured by an audiogram, and severity of “deafness” cannot predict ability to participate in one’s own life networks. Jo’s work has always been about access to service, whatever that might mean to people.

Jo believes that her greatest accomplishment (after surviving parenting 6 teenagers!) is when former students go on to advocate for services and removal of barriers for people who are d/Deaf, deafened, or hard of hearing.