01/23/2026
🎊🎉Congratulations to one of our very own! 🎊🦈 CSHA Michele Linares Diversity and Inclusion Student Award Recipient! 🌟
About Kareesha 😊:
Kareesha is a second-year master’s student in the CSULB SLP Master’s program. She’s a former special educator with over a decade of teaching experience in California, Texas and Louisiana 📚. She also has a background in school leadership in addition to research experience understanding special education teacher values around literacy, language, and communication in students with complex communication needs 🗣. Over the course of her career as an educator and SLP student, Kareesha has worked to build bridges between children, families, faculty, and service providers. She served as an inaugural member of the National Black Association for Speech-Language and Hearing’s (NBASLH) Cultural Humility Ambassador Program. This past summer, she participated in the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association’s (ASHA) 100 Voices, One Future Presentations, where she helped teach Black middle school students about AAC, swallowing, and different communicative methods 🌟. She also worked with Dr. Belinda Daughrity and other non-traditional students to share her story and strategies to recruit, retain and mentor student-parents in our discipline at CSHA Convergence in the spring of 2025.
The Michele Linares Diversity and Inclusion Student Award is given each year by CSHA to an individual who has demonstrated an outstanding commitment to making services provided and the profession more representative of and accessible to the diverse populations we serve 🏆. Recipients are recognized for promotion of diversity, equity, inclusion, and social determinants of health, acting as a role model to current and future students and leading by example in promoting diversity and supporting diversity-related legislation, activities and issues in our field 🌟.
