Happy 2022!
After the craziness of the last two years, I don't think anyone has any idea what this year may bring or how to plan for it. Nonetheless, Dysgraphia Life is gearing up for a big year in 2022. As faithful readers of the news blog may know, I believe in New Year's goals, not resolutions. Last year at this time, with many people still in the midst of distance-learning, we were aiming for small victories - how we and others could keep making small, positive changes to help our community. I'm pleased to report that we saw many such victories throughout 2021. This year, we are setting our sights high and talking about our goals for 2022 in terms of "Three Rs" - although they are not the reading, writing, and arithmetic that you may expect.
Responsiveness
Our first goal is improved responsiveness.
Dysgraphia Life was created with a mission to serve the community and provide beneficial services to those with writing difficulties. To ensure that we do this, we need to be responsive to what members of our community truly need. We are combing through our data to understand what programs have been most valuable (like the free, live webinar series we started in 2021) and what haven't (like our
online community chat boards which we retired last year after they weren't getting much use). We highly encourage you to take part in our quick Community Needs Assessment survey to help us understand our community better and respond to your needs. We will be sharing the results later in the first quarter of 2022.
Research
Our second 2022 goal is advancing research. I am a research scientist by training and supporting high-quality research into dysgraphia is one of the reasons that I founded the organization in 2019. It's shocking how little focus there is on dysgraphia/specific learning disorder of written expression in the scientific literature. In 2022, we are returning to this mission and are actively engaging with the research community and developing new ways to support them. Our first live webinar of the year will be in February 16th at 7:30PM ET and will feature two renown researchers from Johns Hopkins University, Dr. Brenda Rapp and Dr. Michael McCloskey, talking about their research and what is known about dysgraphia in general. We have also already begun planning a new dysgraphia research registry. There will be much more to come about this in the second half of 2022, but it will allow the research community to learn directly from your experiences, while maintaining your privacy at the highest level.
Reach
Our final goal is extending our reach. For us to truly be successful in serving our community, we need to reach all of our diverse stakeholders in the right way at the right time. We want to provide the appropriate educational content and resources to those who need them, we want to engage more professionals to join our Professionals Database and help connect them with our community, and - as we are responsive to needs (see #1) - to continue to engage everyone in new and different ways. To start to broaden our scope and expand our reach, we will be presenting on the first day of the Learning Disabilities Association of America Annual Conference in January and throughout the year will be expanding partnerships and opportunities to engage and support our community. If you are not already on our monthly e-newsletter list, you can join it here to stay up-to-date with all of our activities.
If you don't set goals, you can't achieve them. We are excited to serve you better and make significant progress on our "Three Rs" in 2022. Happy New Year and best wishes for a safe, healthy, and fulfilling year in 2022!
Thank you for being an important part of our community,
Jennifer
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