Kalena's Story
[Title on screen reads, ‘Kalena’s Story’]
[Our Site logo]
[Kalena is in her late twenties. She is seated in an armchair]
[KALENA]
I’m Kalena, I’m from Burnie. I’m married. And I have three cats, a dog and a rabbit.
I like doing craft, like scrapbooking and jewellery making.
I came here today to…to encourage other women to follow their dreams.
I was at TAFE when I was 18 and I met Julie, who was working in the class at the time. And I found out about this program called adorABLE, and that’s how I got involved with Speak Out.
I go the Speak Out Conference once a year.
[Photo of Kalena sitting at a table with a group of people]
[KALENA]
We go to SAG meetings once a month, where we all get together and have dinner and talk about different things.
I used to be on the members’ executive and people voted me in at the Speak Out Conference.
It just built up more courage and confidence to talk in front of people.
[Kalena is laughing and chatting with the group]
[KALENA]
I go to the Speak Out youth group, but we usually do different things, like play games, go to the beach, or laser tag, or cooking.
We’re doing a video, so we were just talking about what we wanted to include in it.
It’s about bad support and good support.
[The group are writing lists]
[KALENA]
So, it’s just about, like, good and bad support workers.
A good support worker would be someone who lets you do what you wanna do and they don’t take over, so that we can do the things that we wanna do and not have anybody taking over.
I went to the UN… Oh, I think it was called the UN Rights Conference in Florida, in America. And so, we flew, like, 36 hours.
The plane was a bit overwhelming, ’cause it was the first time I’d been on an international flight. But the conference was really, really good.
So, there was people there from, like, nine different countries.
We just talked about, like, people’s rights.
It’s a great experience. I’d say go for it, just give it a go, ’cause it’s a great experience. Like, I was scared and everything, but it was really good.
[Text on screen reads, ‘Watch more stories at Our Site oursite.wwda.org.au’]
[The logo for Women with Disabilities Australia (WWDA)]
