Who We Are

In 1997 one of NOVA’s team members, Melanie Stewart, approached me to see if we could start a specialist employment service for Deaf and Hard of Hearing. Mel had lots of energy for this task and, with help from members of the Deaf community; we opened in 1998 with Melanie as our Campbelltown Manager.

The Campbelltown team have always been highly motivated and successful. As a result, the program went very well and after Melanie moved on, David Budd took over as Manager. Not only did our Deaf program grow, we also began to work with people who have other disability. Our team grew in size – up to 11 staff by 2007.

While it has been good to see the teams success help NOVA to develop, we didn’t want to see our Deaf program become swallowed up and lose its ability to properly support people who are Deaf or Hard of Hearing. That’s why we decided in 2007 to split the Campbelltown office into a generalist program for people who have a disability – NOVA Campbelltown, and NOVA Employment – Deaf and hearing impaired.

Although we haven’t moved, we’ve made some changes within the office so that our Deaf jobseekers have their own space and staff working in this area are all Auslan skilled.

We also decided to move our Deaf program to its own piece of cyberspace – www.deafjobs.com.au. Again, this is to make sure we don’t lose our identity as a specialist service for the Deaf. We are trying to make sure this website not only helps you to find a job, but also provides a place for information and advice on where to find other services for Deaf, information that may be of use for employment, education and training and any other resources you think might help other Deaf.

If you would like to contribute to this website with a video, information, links or suggest any changes to make this a more useful place you can email us here.