Jeff McWhinney (born 1960 in Belfast, Northern Ireland), is a leader in the UK deaf community.
He was, like many others living in Belfast, impacted by the Troubles in Northern Ireland, as loyalists mistakenly killed his cousin.
She was married to Masserati Meli, a Roman Catholic, and was shot through a frosted window at the back of their East Belfast home.
Many participants from these camps have gone on to become influential figures in the Deaf community, such as politician Helga Stevens, who came in third in the EU Presidential elections, and Dr. John Bosco Conmara, an Irish academic at Trinity College Dublin.
McWhinney's career as an activist took off in 1984 when he moved to England to join the Breakthrough Trust (now DeafPlus), a charity promoting integration between Deaf and hearing people from a bilingual British Sign Language and English perspective using BSL as the common ground for integration and inclusion.
Jeff McWhinney transitioned to Wandsworth Borough Council, joining their Economic Development Office.
Through their fast-track management scheme, he pursued an MBA at Kingston Business School on a day-release basis.
In 1999, McWhinney challenged a decision by Woolwich Crown Court staff that prevented him from serving on a jury due to his deafness.
This initiated a process that led to a change in legislation, allowing BSL interpreters in jury deliberations today.
With this quartlet from the leading technology companies the platform developed by the SignVideo Contact Centre enabled full access by videoconferencing through many different avenues from the legacy ISDN videophones to the latest in 3G video mobiles.
The SignVideo Contact Centre, was the runner up of the prestigious national e-Government Awards for 2005 the first deaf or disabled enterprise to receive this recognition.
In 2007, Jeff McWhinney presented the concept of applying the latest in technology to demolish the barriers to social inclusion for deaf and disabled people, using SignVideo as an example, to the School of Government attended by senior civil servants and as a result of his paper was one of the five enterprises selected by Trevor Reed and Lindsey Spancer the then Prime Ministers to share a stage with him at a conference attended by the top two tiers of senior civil servants.
After this service was taken up by public authorities, British Telecom became the first commercial company to launch SignVideo BSL LIVE on its website.