>> Amy Hansen: Well, good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to today's Expert e-Seminar. We are pleased to have Ellayne Ganzfried joining us this afternoon who will be speaking to us on “Tools for Aphasia Advocacy and Awareness”. My name is Amy Hansen and I will be your moderator for today's online course. All right. Well, at this time I'm very pleased to introduce Ellayne Ganzfried this afternoon. She is Past President of the NYS Speech Language Hearing Association (NYSSLHA), Long Island Speech Language Hearing Association (LISHA) and the Council of State Association Presidents for Speech Language Pathology and Audiology (CSAP) and remains active in these associations. Ellayne is a Fellow of the American Speech Language Hearing Association (ASHA). She was a site visitor for ASHA’s Council on Academic Accreditation (CAA) and was a practitioner member of the CAA for four years. She served on the Steering Committee for ASHA’s Special Interest Division 11-Administration and Supervision. Ellayne has written articles and presented regionally and nationally on a variety of topics including aphasia, rehabilitation and leadership skills. So welcome back, Ellayne, and thank you so much for sharing your expertise with us today.
>> Ellayne Ganzfried: Thank you, Amy.
[Applause]
So it is a pleasure for me to be here today. Thank you so much. So good morning or good afternoon I guess, depending on your time zone. We're here on the East Coast so it is afternoon for us. Today I'm pleased to be talking to you about Tools for Aphasia Advocacy and Awareness. I had a quick question that perhaps people can just kind of do the thumbs up or the thumbs down. I'm curious how many of you are currently working with people with aphasia? Okay, great. The next question would be related to how many of you are actually involved with an aphasia community support group or program? Okay. Thank you. That gives me a little bit of an idea of my audience and I think that this will be appropriate for anybody that is either working in a group or perhaps is thinking about working with people with aphasia in a group. So, as Amy said, I'm the Executive Director of the National Aphasia Association.
National Aphasia Association
I want to tell you a little bit about the association because I found that unfortunately a lot of SLPs are not familiar with our association.
We are a consumer focused not-for-profit organization. We were founded in 1987 and we are the first national organization dedicated to advocating for persons with aphasia and their families. So unlike some of the other organizations that are more professional centered, we are focused on the person with aphasia and their families. We have lots of resources and I'm going to outline a few of them for you today but I also want to encourage you to visit our website which is www.aphasia.org and sign up on our website with your e-mail address and then you will be receiving all our e-mail blasts, all our updates, our newsletters, et cetera. I want to be sure that I let you know about that because it is important if you want to stay connected to us. So some of the resources that we offer:
· We have an 800 number. So you can call us here into the office. We accept calls and we get calls from all over the country. We actually also get international calls. And you can get information if you call us. People with aphasia and their family members can call us. Anybody that calls us will receive, obviously if they would like one, a free information packet. It has lots of our resources in there as well as some other useful information.
· We also have a National Registry that links to over 440 aphasia support groups. This is on our website. It is set up by state. We're able to connect to different groups or let people know about groups in their region and we also list programs and centers. It is very useful resource for people.
· We also have a State Representative Network. Right now we have over 220 people who have agreed to volunteer. While the majority of the people are SLPs, we welcome anybody to be a state representative. That can be a person with aphasia, a family member, a social worker, a physician, a recreational therapist, PT, OT, any health related professional. What a state representative is, is a person who has agreed to provide information to people with aphasia and their families in their geographic region. So as I mentioned the office is in New York City. People call us here and then we are then able to connect them with local resources; people who have expertise in their local region. We're always looking to expand our State Representative Network so if you have expertise and interest, please feel free to contact us here at the NAA and we would be very happy to add you to our State Representative Network.
NAA Resources
As I mentioned we have our website and we're in the process of a complete website overhaul. So what I'm showing you now is actually the new website landing page as well as the web address for the test site for the new website.
It is up and operational now so you can take a look at it. It is not completely live so our current website is still the one to use for most of the information. But I do invite you to take a look at our new website because we are looking for some feedback from people prior to us going live. So feel free to take a look and see if you have any comments or feedback. This is going to be what our new home page will look like. So we're going to have a landing page and then a home page.
In the center is going to have a scrolling slide show. So that's just an example of what it is going to look like. And our hopes are to launch it officially sometime this summer.
