Happy New Year to our wonderful CSA Members, Volunteers, and Friends! On behalf of the CSA Board of Directors, we wish you all a new year full of tremendous health, joy, fulfillment, peace, success and adventure!
Looking back to 2022, I must say that we had a stellar year which culminated in possibly the highlight of the year for many of us: our 2022 CSA annual conference ‘Our Voices, Our Stories, Flowing Freely’!
With COVID restrictions lifted, we were finally able to realise our dream of hosting a two day in-person event at the beautiful Crowne Plaza Niagara Falls-Fallsview in Niagara Falls, Canada. It turned out to be a super networking event packed with a good variety of workshops, including a full Family and Youth program for the first time in years, open mic sessions, lots of great food (breaks, lunch, brunch, pizza) topped off with a Saturday night banquet with live entertainment from Franky Goudreault, DJ and dancing, and even an outing to the Falls to see them light up in sea-foam green for International Stuttering Awareness Day! See some photos of the event on our Flickr Page.
During the year, we also hosted, with the help of our wonderful volunteers, our on-line Let’s Talk Events with some fabulous speakers and panels. Our CSA Support Groups were also active on-line and even in person for some, thanks to the continued dedication of our support group leaders! We also welcomed a new Support Group for Youth who Stutter, run on-line by Support Group Leader and CSA volunteer Rhea Bhalla. The group is open to all Canadian youth who stutter between the ages of 8 and 13, with a signed consent form from their parent/guardian.
Thanks to the dedication and talent of another volunteer, Zach Seguin, with tremendous help from our Website Manager, Lisa Wilder, and the website committee, we launched a new website, complete with a full registration site that can be used for all our events. Zach also migrated the CSA over to a new email platform.
Our CSA Board Directors, all volunteers, were also extremely busy with their roles, all in line with our CSA mission and vision, including developing and updating policy, fulfilling our STEPPS Strategic Plan, growing our volunteer base and our regional support groups, raising funds, to mention just a few initiatives!
With such a successful 2022, the new year 2023 will see the CSA continue to grow our reach and support exponentially as we develop new initiatives while continuing to expand our current ones. And we can’t do it all without YOU, our illustrious members, our dedicated volunteers, our Board Directors and our partners and alliances. Thank you all for your continued support of the CSA mission and vision!
On behalf of the CSA Board of Directors, we look forward to seeing and/or hearing you all in 2023! WELCOME!
Eeva Stierwalt, CSA National Coordinator