When I started building DeafMonitor, I kept coming back to a question that wouldn’t leave me alone: why, in a community as resilient and creative as ours, does so much of our talent, our money, and our attention flow outward?
We have Deaf attorneys, Deaf engineers, Deaf chefs, Deaf marketers, Deaf filmmakers, Deaf manufacturers, Deaf therapists, Deaf accountants. We have entire categories of skilled professionals who could keep the Deaf economy circulating within itself for years. And yet, again and again, I watch us hire outside the community, buy outside the community, partner outside the community, and then wonder why the economic floor under us feels so thin.
This isn’t a guilt trip. It’s a recognition. We’ve inherited habits from a hearing world that wasn’t built for us, and one of those habits is forgetting to look at each other first.
I want to talk about what changes when we stop forgetting.
The Math of a Closed Loop
There’s an economic principle that gets discussed in Black communities, in Indigenous communities, in immigrant communities, that I think the Deaf community needs to internalize with the same seriousness. It’s the idea of dollar velocity. When a dollar enters a community and circulates within it before leaving, that community gets stronger. When a dollar enters and immediately leaves, the community stays exactly where it was.
In some communities, dollars circulate dozens of times before exiting. In ours, the velocity is painfully low. Not because we lack the businesses. Because we don’t yet have the muscle memory of choosing each other.
Imagine if every Deaf-owned business hired a Deaf accountant. Imagine if every Deaf entrepreneur worked with a Deaf marketer. Imagine if every Deaf nonprofit board recruited Deaf consultants first. Imagine if Deaf families hired Deaf contractors, Deaf therapists, Deaf tutors, Deaf photographers for their weddings. Now imagine those professionals, in turn, hiring each other. The dollar that enters our economy starts to spin. And the longer it spins, the more wealth we accumulate as a people.
That isn’t theoretical. That’s just arithmetic.
Complement, Don’t Compete
There’s a quiet poison in small communities, and it’s the assumption that another person’s success comes at your expense. I’ve watched it play out among Deaf entrepreneurs more times than I can count. Two Deaf-owned agencies eyeing each other suspiciously. Two Deaf creators in the same niche refusing to collaborate. Two Deaf advocates on parallel tracks, each thinking the other is stealing oxygen.
It’s a scarcity mindset, and it’s the single biggest thing holding us back.
The truth is the opposite. In a community our size, two strong businesses in the same vertical create more demand than one. A second Deaf coffee shop in a city doesn’t kill the first; it tells the world that Deaf coffee shops are a category, and now the whole category gets stronger. A second Deaf marketing agency doesn’t poach clients; it expands the universe of clients who realize Deaf-led marketing is even an option.
I want to make this concrete. When I was building DeafMonitor, one of the earliest decisions I made was to partner with The Deaf Index rather than try to duplicate what they were already doing well. The Deaf Index has spent real time building a trusted directory of Deaf-owned businesses and Deaf professionals. That’s their lane, and they run it with care. DeafMonitor’s lane is community news, events, jobs, content, and the daily pulse of what’s happening across our verticals. The two platforms are complementary, not competitive. A Deaf entrepreneur who finds a vendor through The Deaf Index can read about that vendor’s latest project on DeafMonitor. A Deaf job seeker who sees a posting on DeafMonitor can verify the company’s standing through The Deaf Index. We strengthen each other. That partnership exists because both of us made the deliberate choice to see the other as an ally, not a rival.
That’s the muscle I’m talking about. And we have to keep building it.
Complementing each other means recognizing that your peers are not your competition. Your peers are your proof. Every successful Deaf-owned business in your industry makes it easier for the next Deaf entrepreneur to be taken seriously. We are each other’s case studies. We are each other’s reference customers. We are each other’s social proof.
When you elevate another Deaf professional, you elevate the category they belong to. And you belong to that category too.
What Elevation Actually Looks Like
Elevating each other isn’t a hashtag. It’s a practice. Here’s what it looks like in real life.
It looks like recommending a Deaf vendor before recommending a hearing one, even when the hearing one is the more obvious choice. It looks like making a warm introduction between two Deaf founders who don’t know each other yet. It looks like sharing a Deaf creator’s content without expecting reciprocity. It looks like paying full price for Deaf services instead of asking for the friend discount. It looks like leaving a public review on a Deaf-owned business so the next Deaf customer can find them.
It looks like hiring a Deaf creative when you need creative work done. The DeafMonitor logo and launch animation were designed by Austin Balaich, a Deaf creator whose work I’ve admired for years. I could have gone with any number of hearing design studios. I chose Austin because the brand is for our community, by our community, and the visual identity needed to come from inside the house. He delivered work that I’m genuinely proud of, and now every time someone sees the DeafMonitor mark, they’re seeing Austin’s craft. That’s how it should be. That’s how it can be, every time, if we make the choice.
It looks like mentoring a younger Deaf professional even when you don’t have a formal program. It looks like hiring a Deaf intern at your business when a Deaf school reaches out. It looks like buying the Deaf author’s book and telling three people about it. It looks like attending the Deaf event even when you’re tired, because your presence is the thing that makes it feel real.
These are small acts. They cost almost nothing. Done at scale across our community, they would transform what’s possible for every one of us.
The Founders Who Came Before
I think a lot about the Deaf entrepreneurs who built businesses in the seventies, eighties, and nineties without any of the tools we have now. No video relay. No remote work. No social media. No way for a Deaf customer in Oregon to find a Deaf service provider in Florida. They built anyway. They put in cash, hired their own people, sponsored their own events, and pulled the next generation up behind them.
We owe them more than gratitude. We owe them continuation.
Every Deaf business that exists today exists because someone before us decided we were worth investing in. The least we can do is make that same decision, every day, for the people coming up behind us.
Building the Infrastructure
This is part of why DeafMonitor exists. It’s why I built the events vertical, the jobs vertical, the community spaces, and why we connect outward to partners like The Deaf Index for the directory work they do best. Not because I think a website fixes culture. A website doesn’t fix anything. People fix things. But people need infrastructure to find each other, to hire each other, to buy from each other, to celebrate each other in public. That infrastructure has been missing for our community in any centralized way.
If DeafMonitor disappeared tomorrow, the work would still need to be done. So I’d rather pour my energy into the version that’s here now, partner with the people doing adjacent work well, and keep iterating until the whole ecosystem actually serves the community the way the community deserves.
But the platform is just the surface. The real work is the choice every one of us makes, every week, about who we hire, who we promote, who we recommend, who we celebrate. The platform is just a place to record those choices. The choices belong to us.
A Stronger Floor for Everyone
Here’s what I want for our community in ten years. I want a young Deaf person who is starting their first business to never have to wonder whether there’s a Deaf accountant they can trust. I want a Deaf parent who needs a therapist to find five qualified Deaf therapists in their state. I want a Deaf engineer to be able to choose between three Deaf-led tech companies that want to hire them. I want a Deaf-owned restaurant to have so many Deaf regulars that their best advertising is signing with the customer at the next table.
That world doesn’t get built by any single founder, any single nonprofit, any single platform. It gets built when we, as a community, decide that working together is not a nice idea but a discipline. It gets built when we complement instead of compete, when we elevate instead of envy, when we circulate instead of leak.
The Deaf economy is already here. It’s just waiting for us to act like it matters.
Let’s act like it.
— Bryan Leeper, Founder, DeafMonitor