History of Foundation

The ORATOR Foundation was set up in 1991 by a speech pathologist and specialist in communication - professor Zbigniew Tarkowski.
At the beginning, its name was the Polish Foundation of Speech Disorders.
Its main goal was to act for the benefit of persons with speech disorders and their therapists by:

• therapeutic trips and activities, especially for children with speech disorders,

• trainings for logopedists, pedagogues and psychologists on methods of diagnosis and therapy of speech disorders,
• editorial activity, like elaborating and publishing first logopedic tests and innovative methods of diagnosis and therapy of speech disorders.

During the first years, our activity concentrated on attempt to rise the rank of logopedist's profession and to improve the quality of speech therapy services.

The next sphere of our activity has been promoting enterprise. It was our answer to changes of the market and needs of the environment and labour market. Our trainers taught the young how to be enterprising and convinced them that enterprise is their chance for prosperity and their own place in society. A publishing house of the ORATOR Foundation edited Test of Enterprise by professor Zbigniew Tarkowski.

Working on speech therapy with disabled persons, specialists from the Foundation became also interested in problems of people living in welfare care institutions and people who work there. Actions for that milieu were:

• trainings and conferences about managing care institutions, working with charges, standards of care and improving services' quality
• specialist publications for managers of care institutions and individual programmes of activating and supporting charges

In 2004 the Foundation became an OPP (a social benefit organisation).

Check current forms of activity of the Foundation.