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.
Famous quotes containing the words european, league, stuttering and/or associations:
“In verity ... we are the poor. This humanity we would claim for ourselves is the legacy, not only of the Enlightenment, but of the thousands and thousands of European peasants and poor townspeople who came here bringing their humanity and their sufferings with them. It is the absence of a stable upper class that is responsible for much of the vulgarity of the American scene. Should we blush before the visitor for this deficiency?”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)
“Half a league, half a league,
Half a league onward,
All in the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.
“Forward the Light Brigade!”
—Alfred Tennyson (1809–1892)
“Had she been worth the blood, the cramped cries, the little stuttering bravado,
The gradual dulling of those Negro eyes,
The sudden, overwhelming little-boyness in that barn?”
—Gwendolyn Brooks (b. 1917)
“Wild as it was, it was hard for me to get rid of the associations of the settlements. Any steady and monotonous sound, to which I did not distinctly attend, passed for a sound of human industry.... Our minds anywhere, when left to themselves, are always thus busily drawing conclusions from false premises.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)