Strong Voices

It’s hard to be patient when there’s a lot of talk about improving lives for people with intellectual disabilities, but the better times still feel out of reach.

Chief Executive of Whaikaha Ministry of Disabled People Paula Tesoriero acknowledges the weight of expectation from people in the disability sector but says that while she works to get the new ministry functioning at full speed there is plenty that can be done to realise the aspirations of disabled people.

IDEA Services could do with more people like Ghanshyam Diyora. And thanks to him, we have more people like him.

Ghanshyam, a support worker in Dunedin, took on the challenge of recruiting other support workers – encouraged by a $200 incentive every time one of his friends started work at IDEA.

He is from Gujarat, India, and came here in 2019 to study at Otago Polytechnic. He started work with IDEA in July 2021.

Scientist Dr Whitney Whitford is skilled at finding missing pieces of DNA.

Her complicated version of a jigsaw puzzle involves things called copy number variants (CNVs). They are responsible for the duplications and deletions of genes or parts of genes that cause neurodevelopmental disorders.

As a PhD student at the University of Auckland Whitney developed a filtering and annotation system – called a ‘bioinformatic pipeline’ – to find and track CNVs in individuals with neurodevelopmental conditions.

Awhi Ngā Mātua is a community of parents who Emily Writes wishes she had known in those long nights when she felt alone and overwhelmed with the responsibility of caring for a sick child.

Emily, a mother of two boys living in Wellington, is the author of best-selling parenting books Rants in the Dark and Is it Bedtime Yet? – with another, Needs Adult Supervision, just released.

She is also the Director of the ‘Awhi’ online community.