Photo: Tony Intas, Rosalee Shenker and Lisa Wilder
I have been lucky enough to live in different parts of Canada in my life, and in the 1990s I moved to Vancouver, BC to attend college. While there, I got involved in the British Columbia Association of People Who Stutter (BCAPS), a provincial entity that assisted people who stutter with public advocacy, support groups, and funding for speech therapy.
After nine years I moved back East to Toronto and became involved in the national organization, then called the Canadian Association of People who Stutter (CAPS). That was twenty-six years ago! Of course, you never forget the people you meet along the way. I have not been in contact much with people from my Vancouver days, and what a surprise it was to meet up with Tony Intas, who played a large role in the administration of BCAPS in the early 1990s to the time of its folding in 2016.
Tony has stepped back from organizational involvement in the past decade. Yet on the weekend of August 21 he was traveling the East Coast with a relative and happened to be staying at the same hotel in St. John’s, NF where the CSA/NLSA Conference was taking place! He saw the banner and came over to say hi, and was able to visit with people he knew from years back: former SLP Carla DiDomenicantonio, conference keynote speaker Rosalee Shenker, and myself.
Not only was Tony involved in BCAPS, he was one of the organizers of the highly successful Camp BCAPS that ran from 2001 – 2016. You can see some documentation of Camp BCAPS through the CSA article, the Flickr page and the informative video they created back then to promote the camp.
What a pleasant surprise to meet up with a Vancouver friend from that time, serendipitously, on the other side of Canada! Good to see you Tony, and thanks for all your contributions and involvement over the years, it is not forgotten!
Lisa Wilder: "I got involved with CSA when I helped out with the National conference in 2007, as I had fond memories of the conferences I attended in the 1990s. A lot of people who stutter are reluctant to get involved in support groups, but it can make a difference. That’s why the conferences are, to me, the most important thing we do, enabling real-life encounters with other people who stutter. I think it’s remarkable that CSA has been around for so long purely on the dedication of volunteers. I work as a technical writer, graphic designer and content marketing specialist. I’ve also been known to fiddle around painting, writing, reading, taking dance classes and doing yoga."