Vision:

Families and agencies in the Calgary and surrounding areas know to contact us first when they have needs or questions regarding communication, language, learning, and literacy.  We are a trusted support for families – we work relentlessly to remove barriers to connecting families with the specialists and expertise they need.  We provide impactful skill training, valuable information, and access to relevant resources.

We help children grow their speech, language, learning, and literacy skills through custom-tailored teaching, coaching, and skills training.  However, the true result of our work is so much more than that!  We give children hope, self-esteem, and confidence that they take with them for a lifetime.  They apply it to far more than reading – things like forming meaningful relationships, taking on challenges, and chasing down dreams!

We empower families through consultation and on-going education so that parents can truly understand their children as unique individuals.  Parents learn about their child – beyond report card marks, IQ scores, or diagnostic labels.  Children (and their parents!) discover who they are as unique, individual learners.

Our professionals and support staff are committed to continual growth and improvement on behalf of our clients and appreciate the support, challenge, freedom, and respect that is endemic to our organization.  Our model is based on a word-of-mouth referral system – we connect with families on a personal level; families trust us; and we get results.  As a business, we are in a state of perpetual growth and continuous improvement.  We are exploring expansion to other cities, as well as considering distance and web-based services.  As we encounter barriers, we remove them and work tirelessly on processes to ensure they don’t arise again.

We serve as a gathering place for professionals in the field of Speech – Language Pathology with an interest in childhood development, learning, and literacy.  We provide mentorship, resources, support, and a platform for growth.  We take care of the details to make it easy for practitioners to do what they do best – to get out of the paperwork and planning, and on with connecting with clients.  We pride ourselves on being flexible and adaptive in creating our work environment: we are intuitive in anticipating challenges, and responsive in addressing the ones that slip past us.  We are a collection of experts with a desire to connect to something greater – to serve and make an impact in our community.

My dream is that our organization can provide solutions to the communication and learning needs of all families we connect with.  Simultaneously, we will provide a workplace that provides flexibility and connects professionals and staff with passion and fulfillment.  Achieving this dream for our business – getting to a place of sustainable efficiency that serves its staff and clients – would empower me to take a quantum leap in addressing my own passion – literacy.

My long-term desire is to withdraw from providing therapy.  I want to reach a larger audience and transform the current state of literacy in our country.  There is a lot of misinformation and there are many ineffective systems currently in place in how speech, language, and literacy delays are addressed.  I believe that there is more that can be done for our children.  It starts with educating ourselves, educating others, and having access to quality materials and resources.

In this created future, I will raise awareness by presenting to parents, school boards, and organizations across Canada on the importance and value of communication and literacy for children.  I want parents, educators, decision-makers and policy-makers to understand child development.  I will help them understand the predictive power of speech-language skills toward lifetime achievement and accomplishment, and the devastating long-term effects and consequences of delays in these areas. I will clearly link the connection between foundational speech and language skills, and later literacy development and overall learning potential.

I will develop a curriculum and instructional resource that provides the strategies, materials, and techniques that we are effectively using in our clinics.  To make this resource available for others to implement, I will develop training workshops for school boards across Canada.  I will help them to address the state of literacy and to understand the specialized needs of unique children; and empower them to address those needs within the school setting.  I will introduce them to my curriculum in workshops that focus on experiential learning, putting emotion and heart into teaching, and responsive rather than prescriptive instructional techniques.

These workshops will also be available for parents.  I will empower parents to complete literacy instruction at home – beginning with enhancing their child’s self-esteem.  I will acquaint them with my curriculum to provide everything they need to address and remediate difficulties with literacy – activities and strategies that parents can implement at home in a functional way.  My informational and educational video series will be available on my website.

Meanwhile, I will train and develop legions of Speech – Language Pathologists in becoming literacy experts and providers of superior therapy.  I will direct busy families to our “tele-health” resources where our therapists can provide the intervention and support families need over online platforms, or help them find a trained therapist who provides service in their area.  With these far-reaching measures, we can truly impact the state of literacy in Canada and have our children fully integrated – rather than on the fringes – of our society.  We can start living IN (instead of talking ABOUT) a society where no child is left behind.