Make Room For The Stuttering

Episode 237 features Ashleigh Givens, who hails from Detroit, Michigan. Ashleigh is a junior in college, and she is majoring in Digital Photography. She started in photography as a freelancer at 15 or 16 years old, and began to believe that she was good at this and she decided to study this professionally.

Ashleigh’s end goal is to work as a magazine photographer with high end fashion shoots.

We covered a lot ground in this episode. Listen in as we talk about the many speech therapy programs she’s gone through, including getting a Speech Easy device. That had to be fitted for her, and the SLP who did that became Ashleigh’s SLP for a while.

Ashleigh’s first National Stuttering Association conference was in 2019 in Fort Lauderdale. She enthusiastically described how much it meant to her, and her mom, to have a First Timer Ambassador call her in advance of the conference. Both mom and Ashleigh found that connection crucial for a good first conference. Ashleigh did meet her ambassador in person. Ashleigh is now part of the NSA Teen Advisory Council (TAC) and is looking forward to her second conference next month in Austin, Texas.

Ashleigh also talks about the fascinating project she did for school, that uses photography to illustrate what she looks like when she stutters, and what listeners look like when reacting to her stutter. See link below. And Ashleigh recently was featured in a NSA profile.

This was an amazing conversation with a rising star in the NSA.

This link illustrates the project Ashleigh did about what stuttering looks like to the outside world. It is broken into three categories: “What You See,” “What You Don’t See,” and “What I See.” It’s quite profound.