About The Group
The Manchester Stammering Community has been meeting in its current biweekly format since 2007, and has a heritage that traces back to at least the 1950s.
Manchester is the only British city other than London to run two speech and language therapy training courses at distinct universities (University of Manchester and Manchester Metropolitan University).
It is also the home of the British Social Model of Disability, via the Union of the Physically Impaired Against Segregation which formed in Rochdale in 1972.
Former members since 2010 have included such well-known names within the worldwide stuttering community as Paul Brocklehurst, Richard Stephens and Patrick Campbell.
Group members have also included coaches on the McGuire and Starfish programmes, and in 2018 we supported a Big Lottery funded stammering intensive run by City Lit, the only time their therapy has been available outside London.
Since 2015 three members of the group have been trustees of the British Stammering Association. The BBC Stammering Network, formed in 2020 and responsible for some of the most forward-looking and widely-viewed programming about stammering in recent years, had its beginnings at the BBC’s Media City campus in Salford Quays, Greater Manchester, where co-founder Clive Collins has been a member of our group since 2012.
Stammering support in Manchester has existed since at least the 1950s. Former member Keith Ainsworth, who left £800 to Manchester Stammering Community in his will, credited the help and support he received from what was then called the Manchester Stammering Association with his successful career in chemistry.
The group helped Keith to gain sufficient confidence in speaking to teach at Hyde County Grammar School throughout the 1960s. He later moved to Shell Chemicals in Carrington and then to Shell UK Exploration and Production in Aberdeen, before being awarded the British Empire Medal by Queen Elizabeth II in the New Year’s Honour List of 1992.
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