Brittney is a born and bred Invercargill girl who studied Speech and Language Pathology at the University of Canterbury, graduating in 2012. She worked for the Ministry of Education in Invercargill and Wellington, before heading to the UK to work as a locum speech language therapist.
Last year, our organisation sent out an appeal to raise $7,200 to help 10 Kiwi kids access treatment for stuttering. Mike Pollock, CEO of Ricoh, and former START Board Member reached out to us and generously offered to contribute 50% towards our goal.
Last year the Board and Executive Director decided to explore the possibility of creating a history of the Stuttering Treatment and Research Trust (START) in an affordable way. We approached a number of Universities to see if any had senior students interested in doing this as part of their study. I
n April Janelle Irvine completed ten years of service to the stuttering community through her work at START. Janelle commenced work as a Speech Language Therapist (SLT) at START in 2009.
We would like to welcome our new Speech Language Therapist (SLT) – Beth Laurenson – to the team at START.
Why speaking differently can make your stutter disappear – If you are a person who stutters, you may or may not have noticed that when you put on an accent, or deliberately speak differently to how you might usually speak, that your stutter is less evident, or has even disappeared completely!
Take a look at our feature on The Project – a 2 night feature on stuttering that we are so pleased with.
It’s been an exciting year so far for START, and we’ve been hard at work behind the scenes on some really exciting stuff (as well as some less exciting but no-less important tasks such as updating our health and safety policies)!
With the new year came a new location for START! Check out our blog to find out where.