welcome to release

About Release

Recognising that with guidance, ordinary citizens can do much of the work of professional speech therapists, Tara Cunningham is revolutionising the field of speech therapy by putting parents and teachers in charge. As waiting lists and vacancy rates for speech therapists continue to grow globally, Tara is mobilising a new generation of professional with the support of the world's premier certification organisation, the American Speech Hearing and Language Association (ASHA) and several leading Universities including NYU and The George Washington University.

The New Idea
Tara's new idea is to make the delivery of speech and language therapy accessible to caregivers including parents, teachers and special needs assistants. From speaking to the parents of children with communication difficulties, Tara recognised that they have the motivation and ability to do much more when it comes to improving their child's speech. In a weekly group setting, Tara's organization Release teaches caregivers and children the practical skills and techniques they need to overcome communication difficulties.

By shifting the focus of service delivery from the professional therapist to the parent or teacher, Tara is changing a dysfunctional and expensive system which is unable to meet the needs of people with communication difficulties. Almost one percent of the Irish population alone, 30,000 people, are currently on waiting lists for speech and language therapy - a problem which persists across the world. Mobilising motivated citizens as therapists is an inexpensive, fast and effective way of overcoming the global undersupply of professional therapists. Tara is not alone in seeing the problem, with academic institutions, citizen sector groups and funders around the world eager to find new solutions.

The Problem
Right across the world there are long waiting lists for speech and language therapy. In Ireland alone, caregivers and children are waiting one to three years for an assessment and a further one to two years for the rationed and often ineffective service offered by the state -- nine hours of therapy annually. Rather than wait years for a rationed service, parents want to learn how they can work with their child, though the current system excludes them from the process. The frustration of caregivers provides the insight behind Tara's idea.

The long waiting lists are the result of a number of systemic problems. Firstly, professionals in Ireland spend just 33% of their time in therapy delivery due to an excessive administrative burden. The traditional one to one model (professional therapist to child) is inefficient in the current climate. These underproductive work practices are frustrating for therapists. The result is a global undersupply in professionals. The current vacancy rate in Ireland is 72%, while vacancy rates in the US have increased from 25% in 2002 to 40% in 2005. Even if the market could produce more professionals, it is obvious that pouring more frustrated professionals into the broken bureaucratic system will be both expensive and ineffective.

The Strategy
Since commencing the pilot in 2005, one Release therapist has worked with 800 children in both private and public settings. With three additional therapists coming on stream, Release will work directly with over 400 children and caregivers in 2008. To demonstrate the methodology broadly, Release pilots have taken place in schools, and private clinics, with parents, teachers and therapists across disabilities ranging from stammers to severe autism. Approval ratings among teachers, families and therapists have each exceeded 95 percent. The Irish Government, through the ministers of both health and education, now want Release to demonstrate its successful methodology within the public service. The powerful citizen group, Irish Autism Action have also contracted Release as its exclusive speech and language therapy delivery partner across Ireland.

To build credibility for her idea, Tara secured certification for Release from ASHA on day one. ASHA (American Speech Hearing and Language Association) is the best respected credentialing association in the field internationally. Tara also developed partnerships with New York University, The George Washington University, Kennedy Kreiger Institute and the Eden Institute at Princeton among others. These partnerships provided essential credibility to Release in the early stages of development. Release is building an irrefutable fact base through its research partners that will facilitate the expansion of its methodologies internationally, initially through its University partners in the US. GWU and NYU are currently competing for the Release research rights.

The caregiver and therapist enter a joint contract of work, where underperformance can result in dismissal for either party. Caregivers are contracted to attend one hour of group therapy each week and complete an additional three hours of work with the child each week outside of therapy hours. The release methodology allows Release therapists and caregivers to operate at up to fifty times the productivity of their public service counterparts. Children with communication difficulties can expect over fifteen times more therapy hours per year with release (160 hrs) than through the public service (9 hrs). If applied nationally, the Release methodology could eliminate waiting lists and multiply the number of hours of therapy delivered to each individual, at no additional cost.

To make this methodology a reality, Tara is building an entrepreneurial and creative team of experienced professionals with a strong work ethic and commitment to innovation and the release methodology. Each candidate must go through a rigorous four stage process to ensure quality control. The Release team will continue as service providers until the methodology is fully proven and developed. Ultimately, Release aims to become the standard, dramatically improving the productivity and impact of speech and language therapy across the world.

The Person
Tara Cunningham was born in 1974 and raised in a first generation Irish Italian family in New Jersey. With a strong family work ethic, Tara and her siblings did well at school and earned their keep through various evening jobs. Having developed an interest and significant profile in politics at a young age, Tara went on to study history and political science at Rutgers University. Disillusioned with politics, Tara shocked those closest to her in deciding to leave a burgeoning political career behind and joined Ellerby Beckett Architecture in Washington DC as an International marketer. In 1998, a liberated Tara traveled across Europe and after a six month stint in Dublin she moved to Ireland permanently. Tara initiated and led a number of innovative marketing campaigns during the subsequent years at Baltimore Technologies, ICAN and Ogilvy Interactive. Her fast ascending marketing career coincided with an increasing dissatisfaction for work she felt was meaningless.

After a number of years volunteering with children from disadvantaged communities, Tara decided to bring her boundless energy and entrepreneurial skill to the citizen sector where she felt 'at home' and joined the development effort at Down Syndrome Ireland in January 2003. It was here she learned of the problems in Speech and Language Therapy. As she traveled around the country, she heard from parents of their relentless struggle to gain access to Speech and Language Therapy for their child. After a particularly upsetting parent meeting where Tara bore the full brunt of a frustrated parent, she decided she would have to find the solution. The high achieving but generally dissatisfied Tara had finally found her mountain.

Tara spent months meeting with parents and children with communication difficulties, grappling with the bottlenecks underlying this problem and subsequently traveled to the US armed with the outline of a new and simple model. The resoundingly positive response from ASHA and the various universities gave her the confidence and support she needed to go for it and so Tara launched Release Communication Intervention as a social enterprise in November 2004. Tara capitalized Release through savings and has worked unpaid since launch. Tara lives in Ireland with her husband Mark Cunningham and two sons, Eoin (4 years) and Charlie (2 years).