OUR MISSION
Guided by the philosophy we initially founded our organization upon in 2022, Universal Voices continuously strives to give everyone opportunities in developing their communication skills. As one of the most accessible public speaking program in Alberta, Universal Voices offers a new unique blend of affordability and opportunity for all youth, ranging from low-income to ESL students. By increasing engagement through highly instructive, impassioned, and fun lessons taught by credited coaches, Universal Voices helps those without these opportunities in the speech/debate circuit achieve their aspirations.
In their first year of high school, the founders of Universal Voices discovered three major challenges facing students in Calgary:
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1. While students were given daily amounts of math, science, and humanities homework at school, very little involved public-speaking. Yet, communication is so necessary throughout our daily lives: socializing with peers, acting as a leader in team situations, preparing for interviews ... all of these instances involve incredibly important public speaking skills.
2. Across numerous high schools in Calgary, many immigrant students new to English wanted to improve their public speaking and language skills. However, local high school speech and debate programs were often over-saturated and competitive, making it extremely difficult for ESL students to make it past even club tryouts, where they had to compete with native speakers. This resulted in some students feeling unwelcome and excluded in an environment where everyone was already comfortable with English.
3. For low-middle income households, it was extremely difficult to find speech/debate classes that were both competitive and affordable. Many students without access to these programs were completely outclassed in regional, national, and international tournaments alike.
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Seeing this, Tony and Neil were driven to create a speech and debate program oriented around accessibility. In the hopes of fulfilling this vision, Universal Voices was born.