CHAT - Communication Health, Advocacy & Therapy

CHAT provides traditional individual speech therapy services as well as group intensive therapy programs focused on literacy, executive functioning, and social communication skills. . We recognize that many children are falling through the cracks and the equity gap is widened because of a lack of access to ongoing, high-quality speech and language services. Our organization’s goal is to sustainably and accessibly bring our services directly to the communities that need them the most (those who are under-resourced, under-insured, and under-served), to do so in a culturally responsive way that affirms every client and family, as well as to raise the funds necessary so that cost is not a barrier to families and in order to complete this important work in the long term.

We also recognize the ways in which communication disorders contribute to individuals’ inequitable treatment, and the need for advocacy at the societal level for policies that support disabled individuals. For example, more than half and possibly as high as 85% of juvenile offenders have language disorders, which impact their ability to successfully interact with the legal system; Autistic individuals are more likely to have negative interactions with law enforcement; and disabled children are vastly overrepresented in terms of expulsions and suspensions from school. At CHAT, our work is communication justice—from the therapy we provide helping to instill confidence and self-advocacy skills in our students and clients, to the bigger picture societal-level advocacy work we do to make systemic changes to our education and health systems to better support the clients, students, and families we serve.

As described, all of CHAT’s work is to further communication justice and work towards the goals that we have outlined, including providing more accessible and sustainable services to under-served communities and advocating for more equitable treatment for those with communication differences and disorders. Our strategy to achieve these goals is mainly to grow CHAT’s influence and reach by partnering with values-aligned organizations (schools and nonprofit community partners) in order to deliver services within communities. We regularly do outreach to other organizations in order to establish these partnerships and have created an Associate Board of young professionals to help connect us directly to the communities that we wish to serve.

Furthermore, when onboarding new clinical and other staff we ensure value alignment, which we believe will attract employees who are more likely to stay on for longer periods of time and make our work more sustainable. In order to provide culturally responsive services, we emphasize anti-racist/anti-bias approaches and neurodiversity-affirming approaches that recognize our clients and clinicians as people. We have focused on creating a culture at CHAT that emphasizes therapeutic relationship-building and rapport over productivity, which allows us to serve our clients and students in more positive and affirming ways while creating sustainability for our clinicians as individuals. Finally, we recognize the need to attract BIPoC SLPs who are more representative of the people we serve, and the need to disrupt systemic problems that keep BIPoC individuals from becoming SLPs in the first place.

Finally, an important aspect of our strategy is raising funds in order to continue to do our work, which we do through individual fundraising as well as through grants from foundations. We are seeking to increase our grant funding from state and federal sources as well.

At this point, we have the capability to work towards our goals of increased access, culturally responsive services, and more funding to achieve this work. At this moment, we are fully staffed both clinically and administratively and have the necessary team and plan in place in order to continue to provide these services through our clinic and in the community and fund them. We have both a Director of Justice, Equity & Inclusion who oversees and manages community partnerships, as well as a Director of Development who is tasked with raising funding through individual donations as well as grants.

In terms of providing culturally responsive services, we have created a culture of learning – we emphasize the need to seek out ongoing education and engage in both learning and unlearning in order to be the best clinical providers possible. Our SLPs have a network of knowledge that allows them to provide the best services possible to our students and clients through relevant, culturally responsive, informed practices. In furtherance of this, CHAT has provided ongoing training in this area for our staff via continuing education, outside speakers, and mentorship. While we continue to have difficult hiring a more representative staff due to the overall demographics of the SLP profession, we have created our Hallie Quinn Brown internship program to create a paid internship opportunity for aspiring SLPs of color (who we hope, ultimately, will choose to work at CHAT and help us to creative the more representative staff that we envision).

As previously noted, we have fully staffed our team to allow us the capacity to work on our goals. We have overhauled many systems and created a more cohesive mission, vision, and culture for our organization to ensure that those who are working here are all working towards the same goals. We have created partnerships with many values-aligned organizations and schools and seek to continue to create more to create a larger network, audience, and reach for our services and advocacy work. In order to continue to do this work, we need to fund it through individual donations and government and foundation grants.

CHAT has 18 Master’s level speech language pathologists on staff to continue to serve our clients with the best possible care. We partner with an ever-expanding list of partners to continue to serve approximately 700 clients per year. We have given away over $173K worth of services since 2020.