The Marie Poulos Bursary Fund is available to Ontario residents who do not have access to private insurance or personal funding to attend intensive and semi-intensive programs at the Ottawa Stuttering Treatment Clinic. The clinic is located in the Rehab Centre at the Ottawa General Hospital and is only one of three such facilities in Canada to offer intensive therapy programs for people who stutter. Funds for the bursary are obtained through donations and fundraising activities, such as partnering in the showing of films and promoting of concerts. We also speak to organization that wish to know more about stuttering and some of the therapies involved in treatment who in turn may see fit to make a donation, small or large, to the bursary; however, the making of a donation is not mandatory for us to speak to groups.
The bursary fund is named in honour of Marie Poulos, a speech-language pathologist who worked at the Clinic from 1979 until she was tragically killed in a car accident in 1991. She was well respected by her colleagues and was well known as the co-author of “Facilitating Fluency” a manual of “Transfer Strategies for Adult Stuttering Treatment Programs.”
She was much loved and is still remembered by the hundreds of clients whose lives she touched through her work as a speech therapist. The 1993 Canadian Stuttering Association conference in Ottawa was held in memory of Marie. A tree in her honour was planted on the grounds of the Rehab Centre in 1992.
For further information on speech therapy programs offered at the Rehab Centre, or on the Marie Poulos Fund, contact Kara Beck, Speech-Language Pathologist, Stuttering Treatment Clinic at the Ottawa Rehabilitation Centre by phone at (613) 737-7350 ext. 75631 or by email at kbeck at ottawahospital dot on dot ca