“The peer group really helped us open the doorway to just being a part of the general community. We grew a lot of strength from each other. We took on a lot of ideas. We shared a lot of stories. A lot of laughter.”

George explains how his peer group journey began in the 1970s at school when he and his schoolmates created a sports program called Push and Power Wheelchair Rugby League.

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Transcript

Voice: Title: Peer Support, George’s experiences, George speaking

George: Hi, My name’s George Ayoub. I’m a person who lives in the community with my wife and two adult children. I do a lot of work in the disability field. I’ve been involved for the last 35 years. I actually attended one of those weird schools back in the 1970s. It’s a school specifically built for people with physical disabilities. We played sports. We organised and modified a sports program called Wheelchair Rugby League and it was called Push and Power Wheelchair Rugby League. And that offered opportunity for a huge, diverse range of people with different kids of disabilities to play football for the first time.

It was crazy, and we ran it on a zero budget, which was just fantastic. And that was a lot of us going, you know…grabbing information, making decisions in peer groups, just working together in a peer group.

Peer group really helped us open the doorway to just being part of the greater community. We grew a lot of strength from each other. We took on a lot of ideas. We shared a lot of stories. A lot of laughter.

It helped us develop and develop ourselves, so we were kind of in the position of making decisions. I know we’re changing the world today with the new concept of the NDIS, but for us it just started back then when we started to get together and really have a huge input in what we wanted to do.

So, for us, we were talking about how when we had these little peer groups, that separated us from our families, that allowed us to develop personally, we grew from that and we made decisions. So where they talk about ‘My choice, my voice’, well we had that, and I’ve carried that through my adulthood and my life.

What’s brought me to this place today in my life, is I think being contributed to strongly by our peer groups. To feel confident to have a voice, to know your rights, to make a decision. To go beyond just dreaming and to take it to the next level.