New Jersey Deaf Housing

Honoring Lila Taylor

  • June 14, 2018

This video is to honor Lila Taylor and to advise everyone that Kathy Kady-Hopkins is now the President of New Jersey Deaf Housing.

Transcript of each person’s presentation follows:

Lila Taylor
All of you here, you’re comfortable – signing with each other. It’s important to be comfortable, right? Do you want to move in with hearing senior citizens? You’d sit there with nothing to do and be bored all day while everyone is talking around you. No way! We have to move where there is VP and VRS, where we can chat with our neighbors.

Today, we have the Tricky Tray, and thank you so much for your donations. Your support is for the inside of the housing – furniture, chairs, kitchen stuff. HUD is not paying for those things. We have to take care of the interior design. We want it to look beautiful inside. We don’t want a basic look. We want our building to look its best. If you want to move there, fine. If you don’t want to move, you can stay home, fine. But what’s this place? Maybe you’re thinking to yourself, “I’m lonely at home. I can drive to Deaf Senior Housing and socialize with Deaf people!” – very important! Right now your quality of life is fine. You’re young, but, wait. In 20 years, it will be different. Maybe you won’t be able to walk or do other things. We must plan for the future.

OK, I want to again say thank you for your support. Tricky Tray events have long been hosted by hearing people, and I thought it was a wonderful idea. Why not start something new? So I did some research, and I said yeah – we can raise more money. We can grow our funds. And I see here now that’s what we did! Thirdly, a fashion show is something we enjoy, but we can have Deaf models! Cool! So different! Hearing people are always the models at fashion shows, why not Deaf models? Right? Yeah!

Kathy Kady-Hopkins
Hi, I’m Kathy Kady-Hopkins, and today I became the new president of New Jersey Deaf Senior Housing (NJDSH). As you know, Lila Taylor has recently passed away and her dream was to have deaf housing for us. As the president, I will continue to pursue that dream and spread her message. We are all here today from the Board, and we will continue to work to fulfill that mission.

Jane Cyran
Hello, I’m Jane Cyran, I am the secretary of Deaf Senior Housing.
Lila was my friend for 15 years, and I loved Lila. This picture tells everything about Lila. She is signing love, she has a beautiful sparkly dress on, and she is with the Deaf Community. We will be sure to carry out Lila’s wishes.

Tom Smith
Hi, my name is Tom Smith. This is my friend Lila. We met 25 years ago. We were visiting a senior center nursing home; that’s how we met. We started talking and said that we needed to set up special housing for Deaf Seniors. That was 25 years ago. We may have lost Lila’s body, but we didn’t lose Lila’s spirit. She is here to support and to guide us. We will continue her work here. God Bless.

Lucinda Brooks
Hi, I’m Lucinda Brooks. I’ve been working with Lila for about 12 years. I am so sorry that she is gone and not with us anymore, but we are still going to continue.