The European League of Stuttering Associations (ELSA) was set up in 1990 by 12 countries to promote a greater knowledge and understanding of stuttering and to bring together, as a top umbrella Organisation, the National Stuttering Self-Help Organisations of Europe. The Current executive board consists of Edwin Farr MBE (Chair), Anita Blom (Vice-Chair), Konrad Schäfers, and Gina Waggott (Youth).
ELSA is a trans-national, cross-cultural Organisation. It seeks resources only open to multi-national groups, extends the exchange-of-information network, and lobbies for stutterers at a prominent international level.
Its main roles are:
- to link together and further the co-operation of Europe's national organisations.
- to provide a forum for exchange of concepts and experiences in stuttering therapy and self-help.
- to help represent the interests of stutterers to European and international bodies.
- to put stuttering onto the European agenda to ensure that the needs and challenges faced by people who stutter are considered in a European context.
ELSA's work has been recognised by the International Labour Office in Geneva, the World Health Organisation in Geneva and the United Nations Office in Vienna. ELSA is also a founding member of the European Disability Forum, an umbrella disability organisation based in Brussels.
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“England is nothing but the last ward of the European madhouse, and quite possibly it will prove to be the ward for particularly violent cases.”
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“There are many ways of discarding [books]. You can give them to friends,—or enemies,—or to associations or to poor Southern libraries. But the surest way is to lend them. Then they never come back to bother you.”
—Carolyn Wells (1862?–1942)