Loud Shirt Day is the annual appeal of The Hearing House and the Southern Cochlear Implant Paediatric Programme, two independent charities who are dedicated to enabling deaf children with a cochlear implant to listen and speak like their hearing peers.

Because hearing aids cannot enable children with a profound hearing loss to hear speech, cochlear implants were developed and are now provided to deaf children throughout New Zealand. Unlike hearing aids, which make sound louder, a cochlear implant works by imitating the function of the inner ear so children who are born profoundly deaf or lose their hearing through illness or accident can hear.

When the first children in New Zealand received a cochlear implant, the surgeons expected that they would develop spoken language like hearing children. However, it was soon found that these children required additional support to learn how to listen with their cochlear implant and understand spoken language.

The Hearing House and the Southern Cochlear Implant Paediatric Programme employ a method called Auditory-Verbal Therapy to enable children with a cochlear implant to develop clear, natural-sounding spoken language. Auditory-Verbal Therapy works by accelerating the natural language development process to enable a deaf or hearing-impaired child to catch up on the listening and language development that he or she missed out on before receiving a cochlear implant.

Thanks to cochlear implants and Auditory-Verbal Therapy, deaf children can overcome their disability and develop clear, natural sounding spoken language. These children are then able to start mainstream school at age five with the same potential as their hearing peers.

The Hearing House and the Southern Cochlear Implant Programme are two separate organisations. The Hearing House is based in Auckland and provides services to families in the northern region, and the Southern Cochlear Implant Programme is based in Christchurch and provides services to families in the southern region. Loud Shirt Day donations will go to the region in which they were raised.