Dear Friends,

Welcome to October! It is hard to believe that 30 local communities have celebrated their apraxia stars so far this season. There is still time to register which is FREE! If you missed your local Walk, you can still register for the Virtual Walk for Apraxia and celebrate in your community.

October is also AAC Awareness and Acceptance Month. Our Speech Tablets for Apraxia program is now accepting applications through November 6th. This program provides an iPad and hard case for a child with CAS to use as a speech communication device as well as for practicing speech targets. Apraxia Kids has proudly offered this program for the last 11 years, providing more than 750 tablets to help children have a voice early on in their apraxia journey. Apraxia Kids has a free App Guide on our website to learn about a variety of apps for communication and learning. We encourage you to check it out as many App companies have sales this month.

Also, we look forward to traveling to the United Kingdom this month, in partnership with Mikey Akers, of Mikey’s Wish, to support his efforts of raising apraxia (dyspraxia) awareness in front of Parliament. Mikey was also kind enough to chat with us about his inspiring friendship in our recent blog post! 

Apraxia Kids is honored to award scholarships to second year graduate students who are studying to become speech-language pathologists and who have an interest in working with pediatric patients with apraxia. Scholarship funds are supported through the Kristen Johnson Scholarship fundraising efforts. See our website for more information and the application which is now open and due December 1, 2023.

Although our National Conference s 10 months away, we are already working hard to plan our annual educational event. On November 1st, we will be opening the call for papers for speakers for the 2024 National Conference taking place in our hometown, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania July 11-13. We encourage you to mark your calendars now as additional details regarding registration and our scholarship programs will be shared in the New Year.

With Halloween just around the corner, we have some updated “Trick-or-Treat” cards that your apraxia star can share while they are out celebrating. Just download, print, and cut out!

As we enter the fall giving season, we want to remind you of the many ways to give! One of the ways to help your donation go even further is through your employer matching gifts program. Many employers offer a donation matching program, meaning your generous donation could be DOUBLED! It is one of the easiest ways to give back to Apraxia Kids and allow your employer to help support our mission and your Apraxia Star!

Thanks to the support of our community, Apraxia Kids is able to offer many of our programs, resources, and services for free or at low costs. As we wrap up 2023, we hope you will consider adding us to your gift plans, so we can continue giving hope to all our Apraxia Stars of today and tomorrow.

Best,

Angela Grimm
Executive Director