MARIE POULOS BURSARY FUND

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.

Marie Poulos

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

Published by Norm McEwen

My stutter began when I was 6 or 7, and have stuttered for the past 63 years (approx). I took speech therapy (so-called) from several people through public and high school - ranging from talking in rhyme to a metronone to being put under by hypnosis. It was only fter taking the 3-week intensive course at the Rehab Centre in Ottawa under Marie Poulos' guidance that I started to gain some degree of fluency and started to understand that the stutter was only a part of me, it wasn't the whole me.

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