A Message from the President

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This is the season of celebration, of honouring good will towards our fellow human beings and spreading the promise of peace on earth. Let’s all continue to open our hearts and our doors, and shine more light for all of us.

As 2022 draws to a close, I am grateful to be able to report that LDAK is in good shape. We have a committed and active board, new volunteers, and new ideas that focus on supporting our community. And, we are pretty confident that we have the funding in place required to deliver our services and events throughout 2023. What you are hearing is a collective sigh of relief. Thank you so much to our funder, Community Spirit Gaming, which provides us with monthly income, and the Community Foundation of Kingston and Area, who just awarded LDAK an operational grant of $14,350.00 to support our 2023 core activities.

We were very active in 2022 and offered webinars on literacy and the Right to Read Report, our annual Speak Up for Ability forum, and a Science of Reading literacy tutoring program for children in grades 2 and 3 in the Rideau Heights area. We also continued to gather and share information of interest to our community, responded to an increased volume of inquiries and requests for support, and advocated for persons with learning disabilities in the Kingston area.

We continued to adapt to reduced funding, but overall, LDAK is emerging from the pandemic era in a more stable position than we have been in for a few years.

This coming year features more of the types of activities that our community values. We will be offering webinars on topics such as neurodiversity (January 26, 2023 at 7p.m), presentations from local school board staff on changes that are being implemented in the curriculum, educational supports for students, and implementation of Universal Design for Learning principles, and strategies in Kingston school rooms.

Finally, I want to commend the Community Foundation for Kingston and Area for their new initiative offering operational funding to small not-for-profits. This is a huge advancement, and much needed, and will help local charitable service providers to support our community more effectively. I also want to thank and commend the volunteers who make it possible for LDAK to exist and flourish.

Happy New Year to all!