Name: Katie Kelly, OAM
Role: Disability and Inclusion Advocate
Achievements Include:Paralympic Gold Medallist and World Champion Triathlete, Order of Australia Medal recipient, Sporting Hall of Fame Member, Founder & Director of Sport Access Foundation
Qualifications Include: Company of Directors Course, Masters of Business (Marketing) Bachelor of Arts (Leisure Management)
What is a Disability and Inclusion Advocate? A disability and inclusion advocate in the sports, fitness and active recreation sector works to ensure that people with disabilities and those from diverse communities have equal access and opportunities to participate in sports and recreational activities. This includes advocating for inclusive policies, programs, and environments within active organisations and clubs.
I became involved in the disability inclusion sector through my journey as a two-time Paralympian. In my earlier days I started working in a sports and marketing role. I was always passionate and excited to work in the sports industry, and my first roles were with organisations like Melbourne Storm and the Olympic Stadium.
And then I had the opportunity to represent Australia at the two Paralympics in Rio and Tokyo. And out of that I really had a strong sense of wanting to talk more about disability and the importance of inclusion of people with disability in work, life, sport and play. And so once I retired after Tokyo I really started to focus on that area of disability and advocacy work.
My role as a disability advocate has grown organically, but in many ways I’ve been an advocate my whole life as a person with a disability. I always had a strong sense of social justice, advocating for those who weren’t included, who weren’t given the same opportunities as everyone else. So it’s been a real passion of mine.
And I guess it really started when I set up Sport Access Foundation, which is a charity I established after the Rio Paralympics. And we give out grants for young children with disabilities to access sport. From there I’ve evolved into other roles, including being on the board of a company called Achieve Australia. And now in my current role, I’m a Stakeholder Engagement Manager for an organisation called Australian Sporting Alliance for people with disability. And we advocate for all people with disabilities to access sport.
When I was a young child I really struggled to hear and my parents and doctors didn’t pick up on that until I was about five or six and noted that I had a profound hearing loss. So I started wearing hearing aids from a very young age and had to have a lot of speech therapy to keep up with my peers. And I just loved sports, so any opportunity to play sport I did, and I think that’s where I felt on an equal with everybody else.
And then during my uni days I just really noticed my eyesight wasn’t great, and eventually I was diagnosed with a deafblind condition called Asher’s Syndrome. It’s a really rare condition, I don’t mind talking about it because it’s an unusual condition, and it results in gradual loss of hearing and eyesight.
So it’s interesting from a career perspective how I’ve had to make changes because of my disability, particularly my eyesight. So I used to work for major events like the Rugby World Cup and State of Origin in a 85,000-seater stadium. As my eyesight was getting worse, that was becoming more difficult, so I had to shift direction and evolve.
So in many ways my work now in the disability advocacy space in work and sport and play and so on, is about ensuring that, despite your disability, that everyone can still have the opportunity —they can evolve and find those roles that will adapt and modify. To ensure that everyone has the opportunity to excel in whatever they seek to do.
Being in the advocacy space would be very diverse for different people, but for me I do a number of different things which I love. I really appreciate the diversity and the richness of the work that I do.
So it starts with my foundation giving out annual grants to help kids with disability. It also includes my two roles with two organisations, one is called MEGT and I’m the Disability Experience Manager and it’s all about improving the culture of disability in our workplace and improving the rate of employment of people with disability in our workplace. And I also work with the Australian Sporting Alliance, people with disability and we’re an advocate body that represents all the disability sporting organisations in Australia and my role is to build the profile and the influence of ASAPD in that.
Everybody benefits from inclusion, and all of us are connected to disability. We are all very diverse in our upbringing, our culture, our language—whether we’re part of the LGBTQI community, whether we have a disability, whether we’re a First Nations person — and so advocacy and diversity is so important. And I think it adds so much richness to our everyday lives when we have literally lots of colour in our workplace, lots of diversity. And people feel safe, because they know that ‘hey, my perceived difference is okay and that I’ll be supported in my role’.
And we know that by the time we’re 65, it’s something like over 70% of us will have experienced a short-term impairment, injury or disability. So it impacts all of us at some point in our lives, and I think we all have a role to play in our every day to improve inclusion for everyone.
When I think about people who do advocacy really well, who are ambassadors for disability organisations, I think about people like Daniela di Toro, an eight-time Paralympian, and of course people know Kurt Fearnley. And just today I was talking to disability advocate Todd Winther who works with the NDIS.
And what I see in those people is authenticity and an ability to connect and to bring people along in the journey, and so I really strive to do that in my own communication and engagement. It’s about understanding that everyone’s journey and understanding of disability is very different. And people are fearful sometimes, because humans are tribal and differences can make people feel uneasy, but really it’s the responsibility of everyone to educate themselves, to be open to having conversations.
So I think a good disability advocate is that person that has patience and willingness to bring everyone along and an understanding that everyone has different pathways but it’s also the responsibility of all of us to educate ourselves, to be informed. And to see all of us as individuals and humans, with all the diversity that we have.
But I guess when you think about disability and advocacy, it really comes from the heart. It’s something you’re very passionate about.
When I think about my week, I guess my favourite aspect of the work I do and being an advocate is probably the people I meet and the connections I make and the conversations I have. Hearing people’s journeys, what they’ve overcome, and their willingness to find a way to find that role that they want or to challenge perceptions and mindsets. I just gain so much from their wisdom and their resilience.
What’s exciting going forward is that the maturity of the conversation is evolving around disability and inclusion. More and more of us are having experiences of people with disabilities becoming more normalised and I think the Paralympics have helped to do that.
So it’s really exciting for our next generation coming through that that platform has been laid and now it’s really about full integration and full inclusion and that for someone who has a disability, they can walk into a building without any barriers. And I’m not talking about Braille being incorrect in a lift, I’m talking about still there’s steps to get to the lift. I’m talking about a scan door that’s not accessible for someone with limited arm reach. And these are all the intricates of barriers that still exist that people just don’t know unless they’ve been with someone with a disability.
And what’s exciting for this next generation too, is technology and sensor technology. And there’s no reason why a person with disability can’t drive, can’t mobilise around their community fully independent. And for someone like me who uses a white cane that was designed back in the 70s and we still have the same white cane, I can’t wait for that to evolve to include GPS and sensor technology.
So there’s not only great opportunities to evolve and grow the inclusion aspect from an advocacy point of view, but also from technology aspects. So, and then going forward, it’s about the technology we use and ensuring that it is always accessible — because still today, you watch a live stream or broadcast and it still doesn’t have captions. It’s not good enough.
When I think about people in the community, people with disability including myself, I think some of the challenges are around being patient. You know, it’s just that constant conversation that you have every day to educate people and challenge people’s mindsets and attitudes.
I mean I have had comments like ‘you don’t look like someone who would have a guide dog’ and I say ‘well what does a person with a guide dog look like?’ And it’s surprising when I have those sort of comments, because those old attitudes still exist and that’s the challenge I guess for everyone in this space. Being patient. But I would say by and large my day-to-day experience is very rich.
I think anyone who wants to get in the advocacy space is really passionate about the cause, and it doesn’t always have to come from someone who’s had the lived experience. You might not have grown up with a sibling with a disability or so on. A lot of the wonderful allies in this space are people without that lived experience.
I think if you’re someone really passionate about social justice, equal rights and opportunity for all — and even if you’re not, perhaps it’s an area that you might explore and really find your purpose in that. And that’s the wonderful thing about advocacy, is the purpose that you get with your role and the opportunity to make a difference to a person’s life who might not always have that voice.
If you’re thinking about a career in advocacy, I’d certainly encourage you to start connecting with organisations you feel passionate about. You can start out by doing the advocacy work as a side-passion project. It might be something that you do outside of your day-to-day job, but it’s a way in. It will build up your skill-set and your network. This exposure to advocacy work will help you figure out the things you are passionate about and the causes you want to get involved in.
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