Everything you might want to know before you join us. If your question isn't here, email summit@krisdaria.com and a real human will answer you.
What it is, when it happens, and what it costs.
A free 4-day online event for hearing parents raising deaf and hard-of-hearing children.
It's 21 recorded interviews with Deaf adults, parents further down this road, teachers of the Deaf, a pediatric audiologist, ASL instructors, and Deaf creators. Plus seven live sessions and a private Facebook community.
These aren't lectures. They're conversations.
Thursday September 17 through Sunday September 20, 2026, right before Deaf Awareness Week.
All times listed anywhere on this site are EST.
Entirely online. Nothing to install, nowhere to be.
When you register you'll get a private watch page link by email. It's the same link all four days, so bookmark it when it arrives. The link is also in every daily email during the summit.
The summit is free. All 21 interviews, the Welcome and Closing calls with Kris, the "How to Sign a Story" workshop, and the community for the four days. No card, no trial, no catch.
There's also an optional All-Access Pass if you want the interviews for life plus the live watch parties. Details are in The All-Access Pass below.
Hearing parents raising a deaf or hard-of-hearing child, especially in the first stretch after you find out, when the least support exists and the most decisions get made.
It's also for grandparents, caregivers, family members, teachers, SLPs, interpreters, and anyone else standing beside a deaf kid. If that's you, come.
Kris Daria. She's a hearing mom raising her Deaf son, Jayden, bilingually in ASL and English. Jayden's deafness was identified at 18 months and he received a cochlear implant at two.
Kris is Co-Chair of the Parent Council at Sir James Whitney School for the Deaf in Belleville, Ontario, a certified group facilitator, and the person who went looking for this summit, couldn't find it, and built it.
21 Deaf creators, parents, educators, and advocates. Deaf adults who grew up in families like yours, parents a few years ahead of you, teachers of the Deaf, a pediatric audiologist, ASL instructors, authors and content creators.
The full lineup with photos, days, and job titles is on the registration page.
Both. The 21 interviews are pre-recorded, 20 to 30 minutes each, and released in daily sets so you can watch when your week allows.
On top of that there are seven live sessions across the four days: the Welcome call, three watch parties, two ASL workshops, and the Closing call. None of them are required.
No. You don't have to attend a single live session.
Each day's interviews open at 9:00 AM EST and stay available for 48 hours, so you can watch two in the pickup line and one after bedtime. That's a complete summit experience and we mean it.
Name and email on the registration page. That's the whole thing.
Add summit@krisdaria.com to your contacts right after, so the daily emails don't land in spam.
When things open, when they close, and what to do if something breaks.
Your watch page link comes by email when you register, and again in every daily email during the summit. Same link all four days.
Each day's set of interviews goes live at 9:00 AM EST. Open the page, pick an interview, press play. Captions are on every one.
Want the whole thing in your calendar, release times and live sessions included? One click here.
Each day's set releases at 9:00 AM EST and stays available for 48 hours.
All times EST.
Saturday evening, every single interview reopens at once and stays open until Monday September 21 at 3:00 AM EST.
That's the whole point of Sunday. If your week ate your good intentions, Sunday is catch-up day and nothing is locked. Put it in your calendar now.
You didn't miss anything you were supposed to catch. Day 1 closes Saturday at 9:00 AM EST so Day 3 can have its turn.
It comes back Saturday at 8:00 PM EST, eleven hours later, along with everything else. Nothing is gone for good until Monday at 3:00 AM EST.
Fair question. Here's the honest answer.
When there's no clock, everyone waits for the weekend, and then the live calls and watch parties play to an empty room. The windows are what put people in the same room at the same time and turn this into an event instead of a folder of videos.
If your life genuinely can't hold 48-hour windows, the All-Access Pass takes the clock out of it entirely.
Not for one person, no. The windows are the same for everyone, and there's no way to bend them for one inbox without bending them for everyone.
The good news is Open Doors. Everything reopens Saturday September 19 at 8:00 PM EST and stays open until Monday September 21 at 3:00 AM EST, so the one you missed is coming back.
After that, the All-Access Pass is the way to keep them.
Yes. Phone, tablet, laptop, whatever you have. The watch page works on all of them and so do the captions.
These fix it about nine times out of ten:
Still stuck? Email summit@krisdaria.com with your device, your browser, and whether the player loads at all. And you won't lose access while we sort it out.
Three things, in this order:
Still nothing? Email us and tell us which address you registered with. Sometimes there's a typo on file and we can fix it the same day.
EST, every time. If you're on the West Coast, 9:00 AM EST is 6:00 AM your time, and Open Doors closing at 3:00 AM EST Monday means you keep your whole Sunday evening.
What it is, what it costs, and whether you actually need it.
It's the live community experience, plus everything you'd want to keep. It includes:
Listed value is $97 CAD. The price rises as we get closer:
Prices are in Canadian dollars. If your card is in another currency, your bank handles the conversion at checkout and the amount you pay will be a little less than the number you see here.
No. The free ticket is genuinely good and it's not a teaser. Twenty-one interviews, the Saturday workshop with Shawn, and both community calls with Kris.
The pass is for two situations: your week can't hold 48-hour windows, or you want to come back to these conversations in a year when a different question shows up. If neither is you, come to the free summit and take everything you can from it. No hard feelings at all.
One hour on Zoom, three times over the weekend. Ten minutes of logistics and questions, thirty minutes where everyone watches one interview of their own choosing at the same time, then twenty minutes of open discussion.
No assigned viewing, no homework. It's the difference between meaning to watch and actually watching, with company.
A workbook with the key takeaways from every interview, so you have the whole summit in a form you can hand to your partner, your child's teacher, or your future self at 2:00 AM.
It's in your library the moment you buy, before the summit even starts.
You'll get an email with your login. Your library lives here: academy.thrivecart.com
Sign in with the email you used at checkout. If you don't remember setting a password, use the reset link on that page. The Cliff Notes and your Signing Room trial are waiting there right now. The interviews land as each day releases, and then they stay put.
Yes. The pass stays available. It's $77 CAD September 17 to 20 and $97 CAD from September 21.
If you're on the fence, buying before the summit starts is the cheapest it will ever be.
No. It's a digital product with instant access, and that's stated at checkout.
That said, if something isn't working, a login won't cooperate, or the pass isn't holding what you thought it did, email summit@krisdaria.com and tell us. Kris reads those herself and would rather fix the actual problem than process a form.
The precise version, not the impressive one.
Yes. Every one of the 21 interviews is captioned and has a full transcript. No exceptions.
No, and we'd rather tell you plainly than let you find out later.
Several of our presenters sign, and their interviews are interpreted into spoken English. Others are spoken and are captioned and transcribed rather than interpreted. It would be lovely to say all 21 are interpreted. It wouldn't be true, and this audience deserves the accurate version.
The Saturday live sessions are interpreted.
Yes. Every interview has a transcript alongside it on the watch page, so you can read instead of watch, skim for the part you needed, or keep a copy.
Nicole Candolini, Courtney Drummond, Danny Elliott COI, Erika Hackbarth, TK Keslick, Anela Poepoea, and Sean Power.
They're credited by name here and in the footer of every page on this site, because interpreting is work and work gets a name on it.
Tell us what it is at summit@krisdaria.com and you'll get an honest answer about whether we can meet it, before you register rather than after.
We can't promise to solve everything nine days out. We can promise not to pretend.
The part most parents say they didn't know they needed.
There's a private Facebook group for the four days, open to everyone who registers. It's where the conversations keep going after an interview ends, where people ask the questions they were too embarrassed to ask an audiologist, and where you find the other parent whose week looks like yours.
The Welcome and Kickoff call on Thursday September 17 at 12:00 PM EST, and the Closing Community Call on Sunday September 20 at 2:00 PM EST. Both are free to every registrant.
They bookend the four days and they're the community's front door. No slides, no curriculum. Just people in a room together at the start and at the end.
Never. Camera off, chat only, or just there while you fold laundry is completely fine. Plenty of people come to the first call and say nothing at all, and that counts as showing up.
No. Not one of them is required, and nothing in them is needed to make sense of the interviews.
Come to what serves you and skip the rest.
The private group is open for the four days of the summit. There's more coming after this for parents who want to keep going, and you'll hear about it inside the group first.
All times EST. The Saturday live sessions are ASL interpreted.
The ones people email and the ones people don't. Both get an honest answer.
No. And that deserves a real answer, not a reassuring one.
Kris's son Jayden has a cochlear implant. Their family uses ASL and English, both. This summit does not exist to tell you what to choose for your child. It exists so that whatever you choose, you're choosing it with the full picture in front of you instead of a partial one.
Some of our presenters signed growing up. Some didn't. Some have implants. What they have in common is that they'll tell you what actually happened, not what was supposed to happen. You take what's useful and leave the rest. That's the whole design.
Not for a second. This was built for parents who are starting from zero, because that's where Kris started.
Everything is captioned and transcribed. Nothing assumes you know a sign, a term, or an acronym. And if you want to leave with a handful of signs you can actually use at dinner, the "How to Sign a Story" workshop on Saturday is free and made for exactly that.
No. That's a promise, and it's the thing we were most careful about.
Nobody handed you a Deaf adult at your first appointment. Nobody handed Kris one either. Where information was missing, that's a gap in what parents get told, not a verdict on you.
You'll learn things you wish you'd known sooner. That's different from being told you failed, and you'll feel the difference.
You are exactly who this was built for, and also, you get to set the pace.
Watch one interview. Or read one transcript in the car. Or register, watch nothing this week, and keep the emails for a month from now. There's no attendance taken and nobody's checking.
A lot of parents say the first thing that helped wasn't information. It was watching a Deaf adult talk about their childhood and realizing their kid has a whole life ahead of them.
Come anyway.
Most of the content is aimed at families early on, because that's where the least support exists. But almost nothing in these 21 conversations expires at age five. Identity, language access, advocacy at school, what Deaf adults wish their families had understood. That travels, and some of it lands harder when your kid is old enough to have opinions of their own.
You're welcome here and you'll get a lot out of it.
If you're standing beside a deaf kid in any capacity, the free ticket costs nothing and you can decide for yourself. Several of our presenters are professionals talking to other professionals as much as to parents.
Yes, and we're glad you asked.
The summit is built to reach hearing parents, because that's the gap Kris fell into when she found out about her son. But the people teaching it are Deaf adults, and Deaf people are welcome in every room here.
Everything is captioned and transcribed. Some interviews are in ASL and interpreted into English, others are spoken. The Saturday live sessions are interpreted. If something specific would make this work better for you, email and say so.
Of course. Most people register alone.
And it's worth knowing that a lot of partners come around later, usually by watching one interview over your shoulder rather than by being handed a four-day event. The transcripts and the Summit Cliff Notes exist partly for that. They're easy to pass to someone who won't sit through a video.
Almost nobody does, including the person who built it.
Interviews are 20 to 30 minutes. Each day's set is open for 48 hours, and everything reopens Saturday evening through Monday at 3:00 AM EST. You can get real value from three interviews and zero live sessions. Register, and take what your week allows.
Because the parents who need this most are usually the ones with the least room to spend anything, and putting a price on it would put it out of reach of exactly the wrong people.
The honest business answer: there's an optional All-Access Pass, and our presenters earn a share when someone buys through them. That's what makes a free event possible. You are under no obligation to buy anything, ever, and the free ticket is not a stripped-down version of something better.
No. When you register you're added to the summit email list so we can send you the watch links and daily updates. Your address isn't shared with presenters, sponsors, or anyone else.
You can unsubscribe at any time, and there's a link at the bottom of every email.
No. It isn't affiliated with any organization, method, program, or belief system.
What it is FOR: your child is already whole, every kid deserves full language access starting now, hearing technology and ASL are a both/and rather than a versus, connection matters more than correction, and Deaf adults lead. That's the whole platform. Nothing here is against your audiologist, your school, or the choices your family has already made.
It might. Several of these conversations have made people cry in a parked car, and that's not a failure of the summit or of you.
You can pause. You can watch alone at 10:00 PM. You can skip an interview that isn't the one you need this week. And if you'd rather be around people while it lands, that's what the group and the calls are for.
For the people who want to help this reach more families.
The September lineup is closed at 21 and every interview is already recorded, so we can't add anyone this round.
But get on the list for the next one. This application goes straight to Kris and it's the first place she'll look when the next round opens.
Please do. That's how this reaches the parent who's sitting in a waiting room right now with a folder of pamphlets and no idea what happens next.
Send them to growingupdeaf.com. If you'd like graphics or ready-made copy, email us and we'll send you the pack.
Yes. Email summit@krisdaria.com and you'll get a personal link plus a promo pack with graphics and copy you can use as is or rewrite in your own voice.
Promoters earn 30% of every All-Access Pass sold through their link. One ask, since this audience is tender: lead with the free ticket.
Presenters earn 40% on every All-Access Pass sold through their affiliate link. Interpreters earn 50%.
Payouts go out by PayPal after the summit closes and the payment processor's window clears. If we don't have your PayPal address yet, send it to summit@krisdaria.com. And if your link isn't tracking, tell us rather than quietly assuming it's broken.
Possibly. Tiers and what's in each one are on the sponsorship page, and all of them are customizable.
Before any of that though, tell us what you do and who you're trying to reach. You'll get a straight answer about whether this audience is a fit. Kris would rather turn a sponsorship down than take money for the wrong match.
Email summit@krisdaria.com. Kris reads these herself and answers like a person, not a help desk.
Get your free ticketFree registration is open now. The summit runs September 17 to 20, 2026.