The Society is very pleased to present this year’s guest speaker Rosalie Martin – 2017 Tasmanian of the Year.
Transforming lives – the role of speech pathology in improving prisoners’ lives and society’s future
Rosalie Martin, Tasmanian of the Year 2017, made a phone call to the Risdon Prison in 2013 and sat in the Australian of the Year Awards in 2017. She will share this journey, its stories, and the evidence behind the work of Just Sentences – evidence that keeps her shoulder to the wheel of systems-change.
The Just Sentences pilot project brings speech pathology support to the literacy programs of a small number of inmates within the Tasmania Prison Service. These are men whose literacy skills have not yet moved very far along the literacy continuum. But they can! And they have! With the right kind of extra support, many lives which are currently warehoused can be transformed.
Rosalie is a criminologist, an accredited facilitator with the Center for Courage & Renewal, and a clinical speech pathologist with more than 30 years’ experience. In 2013 Rosalie founded a charity, Chatter Matters Tasmania, to bring literacy and parent-child attachment programs to Tasmania’s Risdon Prison. She was awarded 2017 Tasmanian Australian of the Year for the work she began at the prison. She is grateful for the platform this recognition has afforded her to promote the value of kind communication in evidence-based service delivery. And she is ever-grateful to all family, friends and colleagues. Nothing that is worth doing is ever done alone.
