Mildred Oberkotter was 2 years old back in 1937, when she was diagnosed as profoundly deaf, a diagnosis that, in that era, could have been limiting. But her parents, Paul and Louise, wanted their daughter “Mildie” to learn to talk. They wanted to help her access a wider world of opportunity.
Paul Oberkotter's rise from clerk to CEO at United Parcel Service led to relocation several times, which allowed Louise to seek out specialists and schools that supported Mildie's success in mainstream classrooms. After Paul was transferred to New York City in the early 1940s, the family chose to settle in Long Island so that Mildie could attend a local school that supported spoken language development in a classroom with hearing peers rather than enrolling in one of the oral deaf education residential schools.
The Oberkotters’ experience is the bedrock of inspiration that has fueled the Foundation’s mission: to connect families to listening and spoken language resources, training, tools, and to parents and children navigating a similar journey.
In 1985, after Paul Oberkotter retired from UPS, he and Louise were planning to fund “something worthwhile” (as Mildie once described it) that would outlive them: an organization with an objective ultimately defined by their daughter. When asked for her input, Mildie suggested helping others do what her parents had done for her by supporting expanded options for oral deaf education, so that more students could benefit without moving away from home.
The Foundation was launched in 1985 under the leadership of attorney George Nofer. In 1987, Mildred Oberkotter became a trustee. As a lifelong learner, she pursued careers in sales and computer programming, held degrees in psychology and social work, and was involved in classroom-level oral deaf education. The lens of her experience became the catalyst for the Oberkotter Foundation’s work and inspired four decades of Foundation funding for Listening and Spoken Language (LSL) related initiatives and programs.
Throughout 40 years, the Foundation has ridden the waves of innovation in hearing healthcare, education, and technology. First by identifying a need, and then responding to that need, no matter what a family’s geographic or economic status, to give a child with deafness or hearing loss the chance to learn to listen, talk, and to reach their full potential.
The Foundation has realized that vision throughout three distinct eras, spanning decades of technological transformation and adaptive leadership, while strategically planning for an innovation-driven future.
Era One: Funding Listening and Spoken Language (LSL) Programs
Paul Oberkotter's attorney, George Nofer, was the Philadelphia-based Foundation's first executive director and an initial Trustee. He was instrumental in establishing the Foundation's early infrastructure and focus, assisted by his colleague Bruce Rosenfield. As technology, from ever-shrinking hearing devices and more powerful hearing aids to cochlear implants, was opening wider avenues to access sound, the Foundation took action to fill critical gaps that emerged.
Even as technology advanced, challenges remained for families and children to receive early detection, intervention, and access to qualified language providers and programs, including teachers of the deaf, pediatric audiologists, and speech-language pathologists to support improved listening and spoken language outcomes.
When those providers and programs were in short supply, the Oberkotter Foundation moved to address that scarcity. To avoid separating children from their families to attend residential schools, as had been the model during Mildie’s childhood, the Foundation established and offered game-changing grants to more than 25 “center-based” LSL schools and programs around the country.
As those LSL resources grew, the Foundation resolved to address another piece of the accessibility puzzle: a scarcity of qualified Teachers of the Deaf. In order to provide LSL options to the families who wanted it for their children, the Foundation acted to fund more university master’s and professional teacher training programs, educating LSL professionals both in the U.S. and in Canada.
Early Innovation: Dreams Spoken
As home video use became more widespread, the Foundation, with Mildie as a driving force, saw an opportunity to reach an even wider audience with the message of what was possible with listening and spoken language.
Once again, with the aim of meeting parents and families where they are, the Foundation developed a public relations campaign that included the creation of a documentary film series, produced on VHS, called Dreams Spoken. The goal: to exponentially raise awareness of LSL through the children featured in the films whose voices clearly reflect its life-altering impact.
The 1998 production, accompanied by an FAQ handbook for families, was an Oberkotter collaboration with Mildie, Bruce Rosenfield, and leading LSL pioneers. These collaborative partners, including Jean Moog, of the St. Louis-based Moog Center for Deaf Education, and Marty and Kathleen Sussman, of the California-based Weingarten Children’s Center, credited Oberkotter with its leadership in promoting LSL programs. In various Dreams Spoken scenes, a child sings “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,” others answer their classroom teachers, and parents attest to the life-changing ordinariness of wanting their child to be able to place a restaurant order on their own.
Millions of copies of Dreams Spoken videos delivered a hopeful message to families, educators, and hearing healthcare professionals through Oberkotter Foundation professional networks and conferences.
The timing of the video coincided with increased availability of cochlear implants for children and an increased awareness and detection of newborn hearing loss, thanks to eventual standardization and mandates for Newborn Hearing Screenings (NHS). But the Foundation was an outlier at the time with a message backed by experience and supported by research: the earlier the awareness and intervention following identification of a hearing loss, the more successful the outcomes. Oberkotter would build on that message even further and continue to adapt in the next era.
Era Two: Strategic Growth
The arrival of the 21st century coincided with the beginning of the Foundation’s era of expansion. It underwent a leadership transition and entered into a strategic digital phase that would broaden its horizons and reach.
Bruce Rosenfield stepped in as the Foundation’s second executive director in 2003 and became a trustee in 2005. He and associate executive director Amy Newnam renewed the Foundation’s grant-making efforts with a sharper and more strategic focus on younger children and their families.
During the two decades that followed, the Foundation acted to identify and respond to the evolving needs of families and professionals, including accelerating parents’ paths to earlier hearing loss identification and intervention and identifying education gaps for teachers.
Along with the greater awareness of the possibilities for children with deafness and hearing loss came the realization that sizable hearing healthcare deserts existed around the country with a shortage of professionals trained in helping families meet their children’s listening and speaking objectives. Hearing technology, while becoming increasingly sophisticated, was only one part of the equation; in backing its grantees, the Oberkotter Foundation looked to actively realize and strengthen a broader ecosystem of hearing healthcare.
While the Foundation continued to fund university-trained Teachers of the Deaf, it began supplementing those efforts with training to better equip professionals to assist and work with the families. The Foundation’s LSL training programs grew to include multi-center collaborations with centers of excellence in auditory-oral communication, including universities, hospital systems, and legacy organizations partnering on best LSL practices and applications.
With its family-focused mission as its guiding North Star, the Foundation also ensured that financial limitations were not an issue for families choosing LSL. That included grants to The Alexander Graham Bell Association for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing to offer financial aid to families, where Mildie was a long and active AG Bell member, including serving on the board and in financial aid roles.
About a decade into the new century, as the internet became more widely available, the Foundation saw new ways to broaden its outreach to families well beyond the scope and distribution of Dreams Spoken VHS packets.
The internet would allow the Foundation to democratize the availability of services, to meet families where they are across all zip codes and income levels.
Mildie was an engaged proponent of the Foundation’s digital path forward; one that would empower parents with readily available tools to help boost their children’s early language learning and fill providers’ educational and credentialing requirements.
Those ambitions were realized with the 2015 launch of the Foundation’s education endeavor, Hearing First, led by Teresa Caraway, PhD. For over a decade, the free, open-to-all platform has provided reliable, science-based information to educate families and professionals on what it takes for children who are deaf or hard of hearing to develop age-appropriate listening, talking, and literacy skills. Hearing First has become a resource that equips and empowers parents and professionals with the right information, in the right format, and at the right time by providing a resource library full of helpful handouts, articles, and infographics, as well as inspiring stories of hope showing what’s possible today for children with hearing loss. The website also hosts a professional learning community of over 14,000 members that fosters connections and has provided 35,000+ professionals across multiple continents with free continuing education courses focused on evidence-based protocols in LSL and pediatric audiology.
Hearing First has honed its efforts and messaging to adapt to the evolving landscape. By 2011, 98% of babies were receiving newborn hearing screenings, but more than 34% of infants who failed those tests weren’t receiving the recommended follow-up care or were lost to documentation – risking detrimental delays in amplification or implantation.
Once again, the Foundation saw an opening to proactively get the message across about the crucial importance of timing in making connections between sound and brain development. That message is especially empowering for parents and families whose pediatricians might not see many cases of deafness or hearing loss as part of their normal patient population – or for those who don’t register a newborn hearing loss diagnosis as a possible neural emergency.
The Foundation strategically determined that a public health awareness campaign was needed and leveraged Hearing First in 2021 to launch “Starts Hear,” aimed at expectant parents. The campaign is bright, optimistic, and direct. Its messaging aimed at getting ahead of NHS screenings to provide an action-oriented timeline to parents: emphasizing that early access to sound lays the essential groundwork in a baby’s brain development, smoothing and solidifying pathways to literacy, promise, and potential.
The campaign’s aim to “educate, empower and equip” parents has since drawn an impressive audience: 904+ million ad views, 300+ million video views, and 1.7+ million visitors to the StartsHear.org website. Partnerships with affiliated organizations have expanded that outreach even more.
By offering click-able connection through Hearing First, beyond geography or income limitations, to factual, easily followed next steps for families confronting a child’s hearing loss diagnosis, the Foundation continues to break down barriers. Hearing First’s accessible approach empowers parents with evidence-based knowledge as a reliable source of truth, one with an even greater emphasis on science as the Foundation moves into its third era.
Era Three: Innovation for the Future
As it approached its 40th anniversary, the Oberkotter Foundation maintained its adaptive and robust call-and-response to an expanded LSL universe and made a pivotal move toward hearing healthcare innovation. That emphasis has evolved under the guidance of Dr. Teresa Caraway, who took the Foundation reins as its CEO in 2023.
In 2024, Oberkotter announced a new Strategic Plan to guide Foundation priorities – with the overarching goal of supporting families and children. These future-centric efforts are aimed at further scaling connection and implementing systemic change through the latest related developments in science, tech, and education.
The following year, as part of the Strategic Plan, the Foundation introduced a new initiative in March of 2025: The Scientific Council for Childhood Hearing, a multidisciplinary panel of leading physicians, academics, and researchers from around the world. Mildred Oberkotter, who died at age 88 in 2024, lived long enough to endorse the panel’s creation and its strategic direction.
The council’s collaborative exploration, rooted in scientific inquiry, is aimed at analyzing and addressing the effects of congenital hearing loss across multiple disciplines: audiology, medicine, neuroscience, speech pathology, literacy, deaf education, and public health. It will track the latest science and incentivize research with an underlying and unified goal of ensuring that LSL professionals and families of children with deafness or hearing loss have the most accurate, helpful, and up-to-date information.
Forty years on, this latest Foundation initiative reflects a persistent purpose: to give children the best opportunity to realize their brightest academic futures, starting with sound and language-rich environments that feed brain development and language literacy.
The Foundation has become an acknowledged and authoritative voice in LSL. That established authority, conveying credibility and building trust, is especially important at a time when growing online misinformation is a new and invasive breed of barrier.
In this era, the Foundation’s grant-making and funding models have shifted to explore and target new directions for hearing health and intervention services.
Following best practices in philanthropy, the Foundation is providing opportunities for interested parties to submit responses to published RFPs that address and propose to resolve specific barriers to services.
By taking a proactive approach, grounded in science-backed discovery, the Foundation is cultivating the grant-making ground for its innovative eras of the future.
Core Themes of a Legacy
Mildred Oberkotter was widely acknowledged as the heart and soul of the Foundation that bears her family’s name, and that was informed by what she had encountered. “It opened the world for me that I could talk,” she once said. “I wanted deaf children to have a similar experience.”
Across all of its eras, the Foundation’s strategy has aligned with her initial and ongoing priorities: keeping families intact; making services available and accessible; supplying hope, as well as fact-based support, to families navigating their children’s hearing and learning goals; and providing professionals with the necessary resources to best help guide those families.
Mildred Oberkotter also set a remarkable personal example of embracing change. Although she wasn’t fitted with hearing aids until her teens, during her life she witnessed a revolution in sound sparked by smaller and more powerful devices. That revolution called for reinforcement. The Foundation she helped launch reflects her spirit and determination and has championed the growth of multiple programs and networks that have adapted and translated decades of discoveries into practice.
From LSL success stories promoted through VHS documentaries to the establishment of virtual Hearing First platforms, grant funding, and scientific collaborations, the Oberkotter Foundation continues to support what’s happening now and explore the potential of what’s ahead, always informed by the latest research in children with hearing loss.
Impact Over 40 Years
The impact of the Foundation’s work over the past 40 years is quantifiable: more than $500 million in funding to improve listening and spoken language and literacy outcomes. That influence is reflected through its shaping of the programs, education, and resources made available to thousands of children and families, and the teachers and professionals who make a difference in their lives through early action and intervention.
The ripple effect is resounding and shared through stories of LSL successes. One of many stories showcased on a Hearing First space, LSL Life, features an interview with a high school tennis coach who admits he was completely unaware of one player’s hearing loss. The reason: her parents, prompted by the early Dreams Spoken film, were inspired to pursue cochlear implantation and LSL education that resulted in that player’s fluency in the hearing world.
In each of its eras, the Foundation has asked what families needed and acted to deliver resources to homes, classrooms, clinics, and doctors’ offices.
Still, after 40 years, barriers to families seeking access to hearing healthcare remain. Whether societal, institutional, economic, geographic, or policy, Oberkotter continues its work to dismantle them.
Through its recognized leadership, it can catalyze on-the-ground stakeholders and advocates to build on the hearing healthcare progress made-to-date. In building capacity and through strategic investment, the Foundation can also seed the unrealized science-fueled solutions of the future, grow the ranks and skill sets of professionals, and use innovation to solve obstacles.
At a time of economic uncertainty, the Foundation’s unique, singular spotlight on young children’s hearing healthcare – and its importance for literacy and educational achievement – makes a compelling case:
Investment in childhood hearing benefits everyone.
Looking Ahead: What Comes Next
Mildred Oberkotter’s vision lives on in the Foundation’s forward focus. While the world has changed, that resolve is unwavering.
The Foundation remains committed to parental choice - that if parents want their children with deafness or hearing loss to learn to listen and talk, they will have that opportunity.
Expanding opportunity beyond a family’s location or socioeconomic status to better the odds for all children means innovating to remove the obstacles that remain. Their effective removal will involve pulling multiple levers in service of innovative solutions, services, technologies, education, and transformation.
The 2025 release of a Familiar Sounds Audiogram and e-book is just one recent example of cutting-edge information now available to parents – in this case, translating the testing that measures their children’s hearing loss so they can better understand and respond to the results.
An October 2025 event, first in the Foundation’s “Showcase Series,” spotlighted how educational collaborations across the state of Georgia, supported initially by Oberkotter funding, are working to improve literacy outcomes for students with deafness and hearing loss.
The Oberkotter Foundation is continuing to meet the moment.
Late in life, as witness to the Foundation’s origin story and initial eras of change, Mildred Oberkotter described a more promising future for children with deafness or hearing loss. That future was no longer defined; the horizon had become so broad it was almost boundless.
The future, she accurately predicted, is now truly “wide open.”
Open to possibility.
Open to potential.
Open to dream.
