Pride of NZ: Empowering the disabled

Pride of NZ Awards nominee Di Willis is the co-founder of Elevate Christian Disability Trust. Photo / Nick Reed

Occupational therapist has worked hard to help people with disabilities reach potential.

Di Willis - Lifetime Achievement

A spiritual awakening led occupational therapist Di Willis to help create an organisation to enable those living with disabilities to realise their full potential.

Elevate Christian Disability Trust was established nearly 40 years ago. What started as a series of meetings in Mrs Willis' home has now extended to 13 branches across New Zealand and one in the Philippines, involvement at international disability conferences, running camps for more than 400 disabled people and publishing a free quarterly magazine.

Mrs Willis said "finding God" was key in establishing the trust. She was also motivated by her past as an occupational therapist, where she dealt with all kinds of disabilities, particularly people with paralysis.

For her dedication to the disabled community, Mrs Willis has been nominated for a Pride of New Zealand Award in the Lifetime Achievement category.

Mrs Willis and her husband, Hugh Willis, who is also the trust's co-founder and treasurer and editor of their magazine The Encourager, have worked "tirelessly" running the programme and have "since year dot", said her nominator.

Through the trust, Mrs Willis not only hopes to empower the disabled community but also to dispel ignorance within wider society and encourage inclusivity, particularly within the Church.

"I would love to see the churches including folk with disabilities in their congregations as part of using all their gifts and talents just like anybody else, and I thinks that's in their future," she said.

The trust has "healed them inwardly" through "love and care, being able to help themselves and other people, and then being able to go from there into a job or study".

The branches are staffed primarily with volunteers, many of whom live with disabilities themselves.

"A lot of them appear not to have a disability but actually a lot of them do. Some have had upsets in their lives - in their health and mental history." During the past 40 years, Mrs Willis has noticed a great shift in the treatment towards the disabled community citing improvement to access and mobility as hugely positive.

"There's lots more to happen but it is just so different and better".

"In other countries it's very, very sad that some are still locked away and don't have wheelchairs or crutches. We have made vast improvements in New Zealand." Some funding has come through fundraising and recently, support from the Ministry of Social Development.

"We've had an incredible team and so many people involved with us - and if it hadn't been like that then we wouldn't be here."

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Nominations for the 2015 awards have now closed.
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For more information on the awards go to the official website.