Hello everybody,
Last night the Dallas chapter of the National Stuttering Association hosted it’s July meeting. We had another record night with 25 people in attendance, including 10 first timers, a couple of them even driving all the way from Oklahoma City! Welcome to our NSA family Paige and Elisha!
After introductions, we jumped right to announcements. We mentioned our previous July Chat and Chew (a massive success by all accounts) and reminded everybody of the upcoming one: our FIRST ANNUAL SUMMER BBQ August 13th at Bill Wade’s house.
We also gave a shout out to Marcus Peters, a member of our Dallas chapter, who was recently interviewed by StutterTalk, the longest-running stuttering podcast. We can’t recommend it enough as Marcus is a very eloquent guy who talks about things we can all relate to, the direct link to his episode is http://stuttertalk.com/taking-the-role-of-a-person-who-stutters-586/.
Our main topic for the evening was the NSA Conference, our huge annual event. After giving a quick synopsis of what the conference is, we started by asking the first timers what their expectations were going in, and how the actual conference compared. The overall feeling was that whatever you are expecting, it’s going to pale in comparison with the feeling of being in a room with 800+ people that “get you”. Hector called the experience “a blessing” and said that he plans to attend every year from now on.
We also heard our conference “veterans” perspective and tips for people considering attending a conference in the future. They talked about how to get the most out of it (“talk to as many people as you can, get out of your comfort zone”) and their reasons to keep attending year after year (“it’s all about the people you meet”). We can’t wait for Dallas 2017!
We ended the meeting by thanking our new attendees and giving them massive props for taking the very scary first step of joining us, and things got a little emotional in the best way possible. We had people say that they had never met anybody that stutter before and how thankful they were to find us and “finally connect with somebody that gets the struggle.”
It’s fair to say that this was another successful meeting!
Finally a quick reminder that anybody can post messages to our list, just send an email to dallas-nsa@yahoo.com and that will get forwarded to every person. It’s a great way to connect with other people, ask questions, start conversations and whatnot. Also, like us on Facebook (National Stuttering Association Dallas Adult Chapter) where we share pictures, articles and more!
See you in a few weeks!
