Co-design group member and committee member: Kelly

Video transcript: Kelly’s Story

Kelly: My name is Kelly. I like to say that I’m a mother, a grandmother, a nature lover and a lived experience advocate.

I grew up playing sport. What I like about it is the community and social inclusion, the connection through those avenues. I prefer getting amongst it. I’m really terrible at sitting on the sidelines.

So it’s now difficult for me because I had the stroke in 2019. It would be really good if people even knew that I had a disability because often, especially with an invisible disability, it’s not even recognised, so there’s no understanding or acknowledgement.

Light sensory overload is a massive thing for me, especially in a club room of a building, any building, you know, after a game or during a game or whatever with loud music that can be rather overwhelming for many people.

You still want the social inclusion, but you know, when people don’t understand that you’re at capacity, that can trigger things inside of yourself.

I was already saying within the community that they had a very good reputation with the All Abilities programme, which made me kind of come to this club being a local community space for me to see if we can help or if I could help grow something in this area.

Right from the get go it’s been very welcoming. That’s been from the whole community amongst the club. Sports are becoming more inclusive in the diversity space of letting women in.

But you’re still not saying disability, You’re not saying disability.

Frontline advice I’d give a committee to make things more inclusive for people would be to ask about communication needs. That’s a really big one for me.

So it wouldn’t really matter what disability you had, whether it’s physical or not, but we all communicate, so you’d have to understand how people are communicating.

When players register, they fill in a registration form, but when you generally sign up to join the committee, there’s no questions asked about anything to get committee members to register through an intake form.

So that that gives people an opportunity to disclose if they’ve got disability or anything specific that needs to be shared with other people in the committee.

Inclusion is kind of like equality for me. It makes it equal for everyone so that we’re not leaving anyone behind.

Yeah, it’s the culture and the environment embedded in a club. And by the way people are talking about people with disability and acknowledging and recognising through inclusion.

I think I like that I’ve been accepted for who I am and people see me and acknowledge my disability. So I haven’t been pressured or rushed or, you know, my needs have been acknowledged. So that makes me feel really included.