Let's Walk to Talk

Hi everyone 

 

We are Georgia & Reanne and we are helping Georgia's son Zach (age 4) raise awareness for Verbal Dyspraxia & funds to provide communication boards to mainstream schools & parks.

 

Zach will be climbing Solomon's Temple in Buxton on the 31st of July along with friends and family we would love the walk to be as big as possible, so honestly the more support the better. 

 

Abit of background info;

Zach has a neurological speech disorder called Verbal Dyspraxia - It affects the messages from the brain to the muscles in the mouth, which severely affects speech & verbal communication, we don't know what causes this, however it can be developmental or acquired from a head injury.

Zach and other children suffering from this condition know what they want to say but speech is unintelligible and is very difficult to understand, you can only imagine how frustrating and lonely this could be for a child.

Children with Verbal Dyspraxia CAN get better and speech CAN become intelligible with the correct, intense speech therapy - motor planning.

It is a 'rare' condition and we have very little clear guidance / policies / NICE standards in place to ensure our children receive the correct treatment. Unfortunately most families will describe the journey as a 'fight' to access Speech therapy.

This is why it is so important to raise awareness - Georgia continues to work hard to meet with the appropriate bodies in hope to see change in the future. We would love to see the government discussing VD!

 

We are passionate to help all other children with communication needs and believe ALL children should have the resources to ensure they can communicate effectively.... 

 

We thought long & hard for this year's sponsor for Verbal Dyspraxia until Zach went to the park with a family friend, an unfamiliar listener. When he came back he told me he couldn't understand Zach nor what he was asking him in the park.

 

This is where our idea for a Communication Station came from. 

There are so many children that will use communication boards, PECS , Visuals, Sign Language everyday for various reasons / disorders. 

Yet we very rarely see them in 'mainstream' schools and parks.

SO......

We reached out to a local digital designer DPL Graphics for costs ect and to our surprise Luke offered to digitally design the board for FREE, so with a rough copy drawn up by us to ensure the board could be used in a school & park settings we now have a FANTASTIC Communication Station that can be used by ALL children.

 

ALot of background work has gone into this project working with One Trafford partnership to ensure we have the permissions for the boards and I am pleased to say our idea was positively received by various councillors and exec members of the council.

The support and interest is fantastic and we are hopeful that together we can fund this and as a community bring the communication Stations to our parks and schools.