Nearing the end of my internship at Mills Wilson, I was asked to visit the facilities belonging to one of our clients: Brightwater
To give this a little context, over the
last two months I have been involved in the communications for Perth’s Longest
Lunch, an event held by non-profit Brightwater to raise funds.
The week prior to this event, I was asked
to visit their Oats Street Acquired Brain Injury rehabilitation center with the
event MC Andrew Daddo, to experience a tour of the center and meet some of the
residents at Oats Street.
My task would be to write a community
newspaper story about how the Oats Street center is changing the lives of some
of its residents.
It’s during this visit that I met Craig, a
young man living with a brain injury at the center. After speaking to Craig for
a few minutes, I decided that my news article would feature his story at Oats
Street.
Craig had been living at Oats Street for a
few years, and had made some extensive progress since his admission. But that
wasn’t the reason I wanted to feature his story in the article. It’s the fact
that Craig is working hard to change things around for Perth’s younger
generation.
His brain injury was the result of a drug-induced
stroke, a fact he refuses to hide from. Over the last year, he has been using
his story to educate school kids about recreational drug use.
Now as you can imagine, speech and movement
don’t come easy for Craig, but it is his goal of teaching kinds that has pushed
him further and yielded great progress in his rehabilitation.
And that is something that the Oats Street
center has been capitalizing on, to find individual goals and to use them as a
driver towards recovery.
I found great pleasure in writing the story
for Brightwater, knowing that the end product would help share a story worth
reading, and to spread the word about the good work it does.
If you’d like to find out more about
Brightwater, click on this link.
