Setting up and running a self-help group

This page deals with resources for starting up and running a self-help group. Remember also you can contact our Information and Support Service for advice on starting or running a group.

Guide for Self-Help Groups | Let BSA know about your group | Web links, including ideas for activities | A couple of further resources

Guide for Self-Help Groups

BSA has produced a Guide for starting and managing a self-help support group (pdf file 136KB). You can also download the Guide as a Word document (256kb). Alternatively, you can ask our Information and Support Service to send you a hard copy of the Guide - remember to include your postal address.

You can also look at How to set up a self-help group (presentation slides by Rob Coe). These are from a workshop co-led by Rob Coe of the Cambridge self-help group, at the BSA National Conference 2009.

Organising Open Days - Keith Boss, BSA trustee, asks for your views and help.

Let BSA know about your group

Do please let BSA know if you are proposing to start a self-help group - we can refer people to you who contact us in your area, and include the group on our website, to help grow the group. You need to sign and post in to us the form at the end of the Guide above. Contact our Information and Support Service.

Web links - including ideas for activities

101 Things To Do - on the US National Stuttering Association website

Support Group Activities - collected by Judy Kuster's Undergraduate Class in Fluency Disorders and submitted by many people from support groups. On the Stuttering Homepage's 2005 ISAD Online Conference.

The Chicken and the Alligators or How to Facilitate a Support Group Meeting by Russ Hicks, 2001 Online Conference.

Activities for group therapy, by Gary J Rentschler, PhD.

Starting and maintaining a self-help group on the Stuttering Homepage is a further source of links.

Stutteringselfhelp - Yahoo group for people wanting to start a new self-help group, as well as for people wanting to join a local group or those already in one.

Two documents taken with permission from the "Tell Your Own Story of Stuttering" workshop by Ken St Louis and Rae Jean Sielen at the Ghent World Congress in 2001:

To view pdf files:

A little quiz (Word document or pdf file)
Complete the quiz and discuss your answers, or get ideas from it for topics to discuss at your self-help group.

My Story (Word document or pdf file)
Please mark whichever items apply to you and see if you can complete one or more horizontal, vertical or diagonal rows. Some of the items are rather American. You may want to adapt the document as you think appropriate for your group. (The central item was originally "Am attending the Ghent Sixth World Congress for People Who Stutter" - we have changed that to "Am attending a self-help group".)