Tara Cunningham

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 of children’s learning. As vacancy rates for speech therapists continue to grow globally, Tara is also mobilising a new generation of certified professionals with the support of the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association and several leading Universities including New York University and George Washington University.

Tara is making the delivery of speech and language therapy accessible to caregivers—parents, teachers, and special needs assistants. After 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 and/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, 30,000 people are currently on waiting lists for speech and language therapy—a problem which persists around the world. Mobilising citizens as therapists is an inexpensive, fast and effective way to overcome our global need for professional therapists. Tara is working with academic institutions, citizen sector groups and funders around the world eager to find new solutions.

Across the globe there are long waiting lists for speech and language therapy. In Ireland, caregivers and children wait one to three years for an assessment and a further one to two years for the often ineffective service offered by the state—nine hours of therapy annually. Rather than wait years for this 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.

Long wait lists are the result of a number of systemic problems. First, professionals in Ireland spend just 33 percent of their time in therapy delivery due to excessive administrative burdens. The traditional one-to-one model (professional therapist to child) is inefficient to meet children’s needs and underproductive work practices are frustrating for therapists. The current vacancy rate in Ireland is 72 percent, while vacancy rates in the U.S. have increased from 25 percent in 2002 to 40 percent in 2005. Even if the market could meet the demand for therapists, pouring more frustrated professionals into a broken bureaucratic system would be expensive and ineffective.

Since the pilot in 2005, one Release therapist has worked with 560 children in both private and public settings. With three additional therapists, Release worked directly with over 1,000 children and caregivers in 2008. To demonstrate the methodology broadly, Release pilots have taken place in schools, hospitals 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 in the public health system. The powerful citizen group, Irish Autism Action have also contracted Release as its exclusive speech and language therapy delivery partner in Ireland.

To build credibility, Tara secured certification for Release from The American Speech-Language-Hearing-Association (ASHA), the most respected credentialing association in the field internationally in one day. Tara also developed partnerships with New York University, George Washington University (GWU), 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 to facilitate the expansion of its methodologies internationally, initially through its university partners in the U.S. Current quantitative research is being conducted in conjunction with GWU.

In Ireland, private one-to-one speech therapy sessions cost between €75 and €130 per hour. Release is currently able to break even at €75 per hour with free scholarships for those unable to pay. The caregiver and therapist enter a joint contract, and 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 scheduled therapy time. The Release methodology allows therapists and caregivers to operate at up to fifty times the productivity of their public service counterparts and children with communication difficulties can expect over fifteen times more therapy hours per year with Release (160 hrs) than through public service (9 hrs). If applied nationally, the Release methodology could eliminate waiting lists and dramatically increase the number of hours of therapy delivered to every child, without 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 Release’s innovative 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 irrefutable and fully developed. Ultimately, Release aims to become the standard, dramatically improving the productivity and impact of speech and language therapy across the world.

Tara 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 in school and earned their keep through various evening jobs. Having developed an interest and significant profile in politics at a young age, Tara studied history and political science at Rutgers University. Disillusioned with politics, Tara shocked those closest to her by deciding to leave a burgeoning political career and joined Ellerby Beckett Architecture in Washington D.C. as an international marketer. In 1998, a liberated Tara traveled across Europe and after a six-month stint in Dublin, she moved to Ireland. Tara initiated and led a number of innovative marketing campaigns during the subsequent years at Baltimore Technologies, ICAN and Ogilvy Interactive. Her fast ascending career in marketing coincided with an increasing dissatisfaction with her work and a desire for work that felt more meaningful.

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 and joined the development effort at Down Syndrome Ireland in January 2003. It was here that she learned about the problems in speech and language therapy. As she traveled around the country, parents explained their relentless struggle to gain access to speech and language therapy for their children. After Tara bore the full brunt of a frustrated parent at a parents’ meeting, she decided to find the solution.

Tara spent months meeting with parents and children with communication difficulties, grappling with the bottlenecks underlying this problem and subsequently traveled to the U.S. with the outline of a new and simple model. The resoundingly positive response from ASHA and various universities gave her the confidence and support she needed to realize her model and Tara launched Release Communication Intervention as a social enterprise in November 2004. Tara funded Release through her own savings and has worked unpaid since they launched.

Tara lives in Ireland with her husband Mark Cunningham and two sons, Eoin (aged 3) and Charlie (20 months).