Community Impact Grants 2022-2023
Announcing Three GSHFoundation Community Impact Grant Recipients
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We are delighted to announce the winners of the Community Impact Grants for academic year 2021-2022. These grants were awarded to experts in the field of speech-language pathology and audiology who, through innovation and application, promote community engagement of students and professional staff and facilitate high social impact to individuals with speech, language, cognitive, swallowing, or hearing disorders.
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Check back in Fall 2023 for the next Community Impact Grant opportunity!
CONGRATS TO THE 2022-2023 COMMUNITY IMPACT GRANT RECIPIENTS!
Tory Candea & Sandra Mullis
"Learning another language is not only learning different words for the same thing, but learning another way to think about things."
~ Flora Lewis
Tory Candea & Sandra Mullis
Dual Learners Language Program
With the support of the GSHFoundation Community Impact Grant, the Dual Language Learners Group aims to foster language and literacy development through fun, engaging activities while encouraging parent involvement for continued learning in the home and community. Incorporating both languages for bilingual language learners is essential. Implementation of a collaborative approach with caregivers allows clinicians to establish rapport and build parent confidence in reinforcing skills in the home and community environments; we hope that caregivers will continue to spread this knowledge and awareness throughout their family and community units. The partnership with parents and their children additionally helps student clinicians build cultural humility and allows them to learn and practice providing a sociocultural approach, a skill they can continue to implement as they enter the profession after graduate school. Our goal is that increasing parent and clinician knowledge, and competence through this partnership will exponentially impact our community over time.
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Three Impacts:
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Offer language-rich experiences/opportunities for bilingual children aged 3-5
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Provide educational opportunities and support to caregivers of multilingual children
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Promote effective collaboration between student clinicians and student interpreters and encourage reflection on cultural humility.
Jacqueline Laures-Gore, Aimee Dietz, & Stephanie Gilbert
Communication access for persons with aphasia is a human right.
Jacqueline Laures-Gore, Aimee Dietz, & Stephanie Gilbert Creating an Aphasia Friendly Atlanta
This project aims to launch an “Aphasia Friendly Atlanta” campaign. This project will have a significant impact by improving the lives of persons with aphasia in the Atlanta community through stakeholder involvement (those with aphasia and co-survivors) in identifying communication barriers related to reading materials existing within the hospitality industry in Atlanta (restaurants, travel/tourism, lodging, and recreation). Specifically, we aim to implement a program to make materials aphasia friendly within the identified entities, and finally, to provide entities with an aphasia friendly product (e.g., menus, schedules, etc).
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Three Impacts:
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Initiating an “Aphasia Friendly Atlanta” campaign will promote the independence of persons with aphasia.
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This campaign will contribute to the generation of revenue for Atlanta entities that will better serve persons with aphasia, their family, and friends.
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This campaign will increase the social engagement of persons with aphasia by creating entities that are communicatively accessible to them.
TJ Ragan
TJ Ragan
Hearing Health for Athens Hispanic & LatinX Community Members
The purpose of this project is to increase awareness of hearing health in the Hispanic and Latinx populationin Athens, GA, to improve access to hearing healthcare by having master’s levels speech-languagepathology (SLP) candidates provide free hearing screenings in the community under the supervision oflicensed audiologists, and to provide access to financial assistance for uninsured or under-insuredindividuals who need follow-up testing at the UGA Speech and Hearing Clinic.
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Three Impacts:
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Through targeted social media posts and sharing patient education materials in Spanish withcommunity partners, we will increase awareness of the importance of hearing health for the Hispanic& Latinx community.
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By offering hearing screenings in the community, we will engage with community members andpartners to create lasting relationships to increase hearing health access for Hispanic and Latinxcommunity members.
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By supporting Hispanic and Latinx community members with costs associated with hearing evaluations through scholarships provided by the GSHA Community Impact Grant, and by supporting patients with applications for financial aid for hearing devices, we will increase the affordability of hearing health care for patients who have been previously underserved.
Untreated hearing loss in adults is associated with lower quality of life as well as increased risk for cognitive decline. Withsupport from the GSHA Community Impact Grant, we are confident that we can increase the quality of life for manypatients from the Hispanic and Latinx community in the Athens, GA area, by supporting awareness of and access to hearinghealth care services.
