The right Attitude goes a long way
Two Wellingtonians – a mum who created an online network to support parents, and a blind radio extraordinaire – have been celebrated at the 2020 Attitude Awards.
The awards, held last evening, are a national event celebrating the achievements and successes of New Zealanders with disabilities.
Elizabeth Goodwin
Elizabeth’s daughter is her heart, her pilot light, the person who helps her make sense of the world.
Jessie, now 36, developed cerebral palsy after an interrupted cot death when she was just a couple of months old. She stopped breathing and was rushed to intensive care.
Elizabeth is the winner of the Support Superstar Award, a recognition of her online community Awhi-At-Home, as a Facebook group which began over lockdown.
The level of Jessie’s disability became apparent as she grew, missing milestones other children, including her sister, who is 18 months older, were hitting.
‘‘It was hard to work out what to do and where the support was.’’
She didn’t know any other parents with children with dis
abilities, and found out firsthand how isolating that could be.
Her first foray into the politically-charged area of disability rights was in the fight for integrated learning, wanting Jessie to attend their local school. ‘‘I found the disability world.
‘‘Having people to understand the challenges and the stresses has always been important.’’ Many kept in touch to this day.
Jessie moved into a separate house, with 24-hour care, when she was 21. For the past 15 years, Elizabeth has walked 10 minutes round the road to visit regularly,
and collect her for family time on Sundays.
A couple of years ago, Elizabeth undertook a project interviewing 70 parents of children with disabilities across the country, and found isolation was a big problem.
At the onset of Covid, she ‘‘had the voices of parents in my head saying: ‘School is my respite, school is when I catch up on sleep, school is when I’m able to do the things that I can’t do with my child at home’.’’
The result was Awhi-At-Home, where parents and experts could share information and advice in a low-pressure environment, with funding by Oranga Tamariki and IHC.
The page gained more than 200,000 views. Feedback from parents, though, was that Facebook didn’t feel private, and the same discussions happened over and over.
A new website, Awhi Nga¯ Ma¯tua, is in the pipeline, where topics are organised by page and easily searchable.
Jonathan Mosen
Blind since birth, Jonathan has spent his life opening doors for other people and, despite a degenerative hearing disorder, he is a prominent figure in radio.
He is one of the few disabled chief executives of national disability organisations, the founder of ACB radio, and a disability-centric podcast Mosen at Large, and was made a member of the NZ Order ofMerit in 2019.
Jonathan is the winner of the Impact Award, a recognition of his work at the head of Workbridge, a company connecting people with disabilities to potential employers, and advocating for inclusion and awareness in the workplace.
‘‘We can prepare disabled people for employment, but we also change attitudes.’’
He is the only person to have been both chair of the Blind Foundation and president of Blind Citizens.
His campaigning successfully changed a law governing disabled people on juries and achieved a law change to the Copyright Act that has been emulated worldwide, and recently advocated to improve accessibility of the Covid-19 tracing app, which is not set up for the visually impaired.
At Workbridge he introduced new initiatives including accessible kiosks, a new strategic plan to ensure the workplace is as accessible as possible, and new digital channels catered to those with disabilities.
Many businesses thought of people with disabilities as a health and safety risk, Jonathan said.
‘‘But what you get with a disabled person is a competent employee.’’
A conversation with politician Dame Tariana Turia in the 1990s had stuck with him. ‘‘She said: ‘Disabled people and Ma¯ori have a lot in common; other people always think they know what’s best for us’.’’
In a nutshell, Jonathan’s work was about giving disabled people ‘‘greater control of our own destiny’’.