Published on: 31st December 2024
This episode of “Life as a Deaf Business Owner” features Fiona Fonti, a Deaf occupational therapist and entrepreneur, sharing her journey of founding The Rehabilitation Specialists.
She highlights her commitment to supporting the Deaf community and empowering others through mentorship and inclusive practices.
This video is part of a series where we are highlighting Deaf business owners from around Australia.
We will be uploading this video to the “Life as a Deaf Business Owner” YouTube playlist.
Have a look there for more episodes from “Life as a Deaf Business Owner”!
Visual description: The video features a Deaf business owner, Fiona Fonti, who explains her journey as an entrepreneur. She is wearing a white dress with her hair pulled back; she is looking professional and friendly. She is filmed being interviewed in multiple professional spaces, most of the time she is seated against a plain background wall. She is oral, so when she is speaking, there is a picture-in-picture layover of an interpreter signing what she is saying.
Transcript: Hi, my name’s Fiona Fonti. Fiona, this is my sign name. I am the owner of The Rehabilitation Specialists. I founded The Rehabilitation Specialists back in 2012. So back in 2012, I was working for a really big national company, and that company decided that they weren’t going to operate one part of their business. And so I had to go through a redundancy process. And in that time, I was like, “Ah, I’ve worked so hard. There’s so much more that I can do. I’m just going to give it a go and try it myself.”
When I started the business, I didn’t really think about the challenges of being Deaf and running a business. It was just, “I need to give it a go and kind of make it work.” I’ve always really enjoyed helping people in the workplace and to return to work, and understanding disability needs.
One of my goals at the very start of the business was that one day I’d really like to be able to support and offer services for the Deaf community as well because there’s not a lot out there in that industry that really had a lot of Deaf awareness. So that was one of my goals, but I didn’t know how I was going to get there at the beginning.
It’s been a really long journey along the way, and it’s just really nice to now be at a point in time where we have Deaf-aware OTs on the team. I am Deaf, and I am an Occupational Therapist. We’ve been able to sponsor the Australian Deaf Games and just kind of been able to give back and support our community.
So I definitely grew up speaking and being part of mainstream school. Even though I’m profoundly Deaf, speaking can be challenging because you can’t hear everything, especially when I was wearing hearing aids. That’s how I was brought up, so speaking is my most comfortable form of communication.
I can understand Auslan, and I really want to improve my skills to be able to use Auslan because, yeah, I really wish I had that opportunity as a child to learn Auslan because it would have made so many other things in my life a lot easier. Now I’m a big advocate for children having both options so that they can choose themselves later on in life what works best for them.
Inclusivity and diversity are two kind of different things, and they are quite broad. But the more different people we have in the workplace, the more different experiences, and the actually better we can serve our clients and the more awareness we can build within our own team and our own workplaces.
This just means that there might be, I guess, more creative services or more targeted services that we can actually provide to the community. So the more diverse your team is, the more we learn about each other. I think the better the services we can provide to the community.
Without diversity, we don’t grow, and we don’t learn from each other. I think it’s a really big part of business development and business growth for you to learn from each other and kind of embrace and be open to being flexible and having reasonable adjustments in your own workplace because you see what’s possible.
If you can, find a mentor or someone that you can speak to who has started their own business as well. Maybe sit down with them and brainstorm your ideas and kind of what you’d like to achieve. Draw on guidance and support from the other person about what has worked for them.
Just draw on the support around you. There’s a big community out there of Deaf business owners, and we would all, I’m sure, love to share our experience and support other people.
