Parkinson Voice Project awards 2021 SPEAK OUT & LOUD Crowd Grant to OSU

Friday, October 1, 2021

Media Contact: Jacob Longan | Coordinator of Communication and Sciences, College of Arts and Sciences | 405-744-7497 | jacob.longan@okstate.edu

About the Parkinson Voice Project

Parkinson Voice Project is the only 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization in the world solely dedicated to helping individuals with Parkinson’s improve their speech and swallowing. The organization runs a speech therapy clinic in the Dallas-Fort Worth area and hosts the World’s Largest Parkinson’s Chorus.

Parkinson Voice Project’s hosts daily online speech practice sessions to support and encourage people with Parkinson’s globally. These sessions are available on the organization’s website.

Parkinson Voice Project has trained more than 3500 speech-language pathologists in its SPEAK OUT! & LOUD Crowd program, including clinicians in Australia, Canada, Israel, Italy, Greece, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, New Zealand, South Africa, Taiwan, and the United Kingdom.

The Parkinson Voice Project has named Oklahoma State University as a recipient of its 2021 SPEAK OUT! & LOUD Crowd Grant Program. A full listing of the 2021 grant recipients can be found here.

Grant recipients include hospitals, university speech therapy clinics, private practices, and nonprofit organizations. Each clinic receives therapy supplies and free training for their speech-language pathologists and graduate students. The OSU Speech and Hearing Clinic is committed to offering Parkinson Voice Project’s effective speech therapy program in the Stillwater area.

“Up to 90% of people with Parkinson’s are at high risk of losing their ability to speak, and swallowing complications account for 70% of the mortality rate in this patient population. Our vision at Parkinson Voice Project is to make our highly effective speech therapy program accessible to people with Parkinson’s worldwide,” said Parkinson Voice Project’s Founder and CEO Samantha Elandary.

This grant program honors Daniel R. Boone, Ph.D., CCC-SLP a world-renowned speech-language pathologist and voice expert who recognized in the late 1950s that individuals with Parkinson's could improve their communication by “speaking with intent." Parkinson Voice Project’s program combines individual and group therapy to convert speech from an automatic function to an intentional act.