Real Stories of Change
See how our Champions are helping people in their community. These are real stories of change from people across the Wide Bay Burnett and Central Queensland regions. Our Champions and Expert Advisory Group members speak for themselves. They do not speak for Wide Bay Advocacy. Only people Wide Bay Advocacy has given permission to can speak for the organisation.
Emery, Fraser Coast
Emery has lived on the Fraser Coast for around 14 years and has lived experience of disability, alongside a professional role in the care sector. Emery believes support for people with disability works best when it combines lived experience with sound, evidence-based knowledge.
When Emery first entered the disability support system, it was overwhelming. Emery did not know what supports were available, what was possible, or where to turn. An early support arrangement went badly wrong and left a lasting impact. What changed things was not a formal service. It was peer support. Another person with lived experience noticed something was not right, listened, and helped Emery find safer ground. Emery has said plainly that this help was the ground everything else was built on.
That experience is exactly why Emery wanted to become a Foundational Supports Community Champion. Emery knows the difference between being handed a system and being genuinely supported by a peer who has been there. As a Champion, Emery focuses on connection and presence: noticing people, listening, and helping them feel less alone.
The program has also sharpened what Emery brings. Emery describes growing in confidence and developing a clearer picture of unmet need across the region, particularly among people with psychosocial disability who fall outside formal supports. That understanding shapes how Emery approaches the role, with a focus on connection, listening, and reaching people who are easy to miss.
Emery’s story shows why peer connection matters, especially for people who are hard to reach or who sit outside formal supports. The wins are often human and specific. A conversation that helps someone feel seen. A moment where someone realises they are not on their own. In a tight-knit community, Emery believes, if you talk to enough people, someone will know someone who can help.
Tina, Childers
Tina has lived in the Childers and Bundaberg region for four years, after moving north from Brisbane with her husband to build a life on a rural property. She works in the disability and community sector, and she has spent more than two decades in government and community roles. Her working life has been spent close to the systems people rely on when they need help.
Tina does not have personal lived experience of disability. Her connection to this work comes from a different place. Over many years she has seen how hard the support system can be to reach, both in her professional roles and within her own family. She has spoken about a time when, even after decades working inside government, she could not find a support pathway for a family member who needed one. That experience stayed with her. It shaped a firm belief that finding support should not depend on knowing the right people.
That belief is what drew Tina to the Foundational Supports Community Champions program. As a Champion, her contribution is connection. She listens. She takes time to understand what a person is actually looking for, rather than deciding it for them. In her words, it is not your journey, it is their journey.
The program has given Tina a chance to see familiar issues through a different lens. She values the connection with other Champions and the lived experience they share so generously. It has also reminded her of something simple. To stop, to listen, and to let the solution come, rather than listening only to reply.
Tina’s story reflects a quieter side of the program. Not everyone comes to it through lived experience of disability. Some come through years of seeing how hard it can be for people to find help, and wanting to be part of something better. Tina champions through the people she connects with. In her workplace, in her community, and alongside the other Champions. Her hope is a simple one. That people looking for support are met by someone who will take the time to listen.
Barbara, Hervey Bay
Barbara has lived in Hervey Bay for four decades and has lived experience of disability. She has watched her community grow quickly, and she has seen how easily people with disability can be left isolated when local support is thin, transport is limited, and services feel clinical or hard to reach.
Barbara joined the Foundational Supports Community Champions program because she saw a real need for connection that comes from lived experience, not from a service provider or a clinical setting. She knows, first-hand, what it is like to look for support and struggle to find people who understand.
Barbara’s contribution is peer support and connection. She listens. She takes the time to get to know people. She looks past a diagnosis or a hard day to the person in front of her. In her words, it is about making people feel welcome and heard.
The program has also built on Barbara’s existing strengths. She describes growing in confidence, sharpening how she listens, and learning to look past behaviour to the person and the unmet need behind it. Learning alongside other Champions, and watching how the Wide Bay Advocacy team works, has been a meaningful part of that growth.
Barbara’s story illustrates the program’s central idea. When a community member with lived experience is supported to connect with others, isolation reduces and people feel less alone. The impact is often quiet and personal. As Barbara puts it, a little bit of time can make all the difference in somebody else’s journey.
Karen, Fraser Coast
Karen has lived on the Fraser Coast since 2010, when she moved to the region at seven. She has lived experience of disability, and a history of community and policy work that began earlier than most people’s working lives.
Her first act of volunteering was at seven. She was at her local RSL with her family, where Legacy was looking for helpers. Karen asked if she could be one. She was told she was too young. Her mum said she had to ask for herself. She did, and they let her in.
What shaped her more than anything was being asked. Growing up, Karen was often left out and talked over. Then one person asked what she thought, and listened to the answer. She traces everything that followed back to that moment. Youth parliament. Community and policy work from the age of fourteen. A working life built around people.
By the time the Champion program came along, Karen was already doing much of this on her own. That was the problem. She describes the work as siloed, a solo game where you build your own networks and carry it yourself. The program changed that. For the first time she was in a group of people who all had lived experience.
The learning she names first is about peer groups. Karen had worked in mental health group settings, but not disability peer support. The purpose is different. A peer group is not about teaching or steering. It is about camaraderie and a safe space, where nobody feels isolated, and where someone further along can sit with someone newer and say, I have been there.
That is the difference this program is built to make. Not a service, and not a professional standing at a distance. A local person who has lived it, trained, and connected to others doing the same.
Asked what she would say to someone who is nervous about reaching out, Karen is direct. Everyone struggles. Everyone gets help in some form. When you are sick you go to a doctor, and this is no different.
“We want people to see that others have been there, and will help you get through it too.”
Kristie, South Burnett
Kristie lives on a cattle property out of Kumbia in the South Burnett, about 35 kilometres from Kingaroy. Her husband James works on the property. Their son Mitchell is eleven. They breed Australian Stock Horses and Kristie runs her own bookkeeping business. As she puts it, it all keeps them out of trouble.
Kristie has lived experience of disability. When she first came into the support system, she had no idea where to start. She went a long time without a support coordinator and worked most of it out on her own. It was overwhelming. Her question was not what to do next. It was where to begin at all.
Living in the country made it harder. Support is reasonably easy to find in Kingaroy. Thirty five kilometres out, it is a different story. Providers charge for the travel, and the further out you are, the less keen they are to come. Telehealth has helped. More than once it has saved her a day trip to Toowoomba or a night away in Brisbane.
The family spends a lot of weekends at camp drafts and showgrounds. Kristie notices what those grounds are like for someone who cannot walk far. Very little is set up for it, and not only for people with disability. An older person, or someone with a broken leg, hits the same wall.
A trip to Brisbane made the point again. Kristie went down for a dinner connected to research into her condition. The motel had no accessible parking, and the car park across the road was too low for the hoist on the back of their ute. The taxis were booked in advance. The one to the event took more than an hour to arrive. The one home was booked for ten o’clock and did not turn up until after midnight.
Afterwards her husband wondered aloud whether it would have been easier to leave the wheelchair at home and use her hiking poles instead. Her answer says a lot about why she is a Champion.
“You shouldn’t have to compromise on your own safety and wellbeing.”
That is what she wants for other people too. Someone in their corner, early, before they spend years working it out alone.
The wins are ordinary and human. Knowing other people are dealing with things as well. Knowing there is someone to talk to. Kristie has found that in the program herself, among a group of Champions who live very different lives and still have a great deal in common.
Her advice to anyone unsure about asking for help is short. Get involved, and get help from someone who has been there.
“Just try and get involved. Get some help. Real life experience help.”
Lara, Childers
Lara lives on a farm at Childers, on land her great-grandfather cleared in the 1800s. Her brother and her parents live on other parts of it. She has lived experience of disability, and spent nine years working in a medical centre before that role came to an end.
That ending left a gap. Lara describes feeling a bit lost, and unsure what came next.
Around the same time she had a moment she still comes back to. She was sitting around a table one afternoon with her husband, her brother and her sister-in-law. Three of the four people there had a brother or sister with disability. Lara is the fourth, and lives with disability herself. She had never counted it up before. It made her want to know what support was out there, for them and for herself.
When the Champion program came up, she took it. She started with no background in disability support and no connection to the service system. She says there was not one module where she thought, I knew that already.
The change she names first is trauma-informed practice. In a medical centre, the job is to fix the problem in front of you. Peer support works differently. You are not there to fix someone. You are there to listen, to support and to sit alongside them. Lara is honest that holding back her instinct to fix took real work. It is also the skill she now values most.
Lara’s story shows what the program is built to do. It reaches capable local people who were never inside the service system, gives them real skills, and puts peer support where people actually live. For a community like Childers, that matters. Services are a drive away. A Champion is not.
Asked what she would say to someone who needs help but is afraid to ask, Lara does not hesitate. It is a line she got from her father.
“You don’t know if you don’t ask.”