This week, I was fortunate to address St.Giles' annual Inclusivity ceremony where it recognises the many people who contribute to its success, including those who had fundraised for the organisation.
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From retailers who raised $80,000 but plan to crack six figures next year, to eight-year-old Annalise Shearing who raised $1000 for a wheelchair.
Annalise spent three months in a wheelchair after a gate fell on her foot and broke it.
The Trevallyn Primary School pupil was inspired to give something back to those who helped her and sold silk scarves and glitter slime kits at markets and on a website she made herself.
She originally aimed to buy a pink wheelchair, but later decided blue would be better for boys and girls and decorated it with stickers of the universe.
What a superstar.
Apart from the stitch up that all the other presenters wore costumes and were hilarious, making me look like the stiff in a suit, it was a great event.
I followed tutu-wearing nurses Poodene and Eweesha who did an informative skit about controlling incontinence full of, you guessed it, poo and wee jokes.
Good luck following that, chairman Ben Coull said in my introduction.
Despite 90 per cent of my material gone, it was much easier than the last St.Giles event I took part in, the Balfour Burn.
My wife and I took part in the event with about 30 seconds of forethought and even less training.
I used to live in a little house near the corner of Balfour and St John streets so believing in some type of home ground advantage, registered.
I should have realised that my home ground advantage was limited to walking down the hill at 2am with a garlic kebab.
About halfway up, came the epiphany that a curry and two bottles of red the night before were perhaps not the preparation required. But we made it.
Lying there, and I literally mean lying there, I started to worry whether lactic acid could kill you.
I couldn’t get my breath back. I couldn’t move. I actually had to get my wife, who made the ascent without any side effects, to walk back down the hill and get the car to pick me up.
My mum had come to watch and she was trying to make me drink electrolytes … “Mum, you’re embarrassing me!”
In that moment, the words of an old soccer coach came to mind, in fact I might have been hallucinating, because I’m pretty sure he was floating ghost-like above the finish line.
“Bakes,” he said. “Don’t get your aspirations mixed up with your ability.”
I clearly had done that.
Many of us have experienced situations where we do get our aspirations and our abilities confused.
Some of us have probably been involved in groups or organisations that have done the same. Where we set an ambitious goal and fail, for whatever reason, to achieve them.
St.Giles is not one of those groups. It is an organisation whose aspirations and abilities are well aligned. From its dedicated staff, to its amazing clients.
Our community and our state is the better for knowing such an organisation exists.
Most people in our community have a connection to St.Giles.
As a journalist, I have spoken to parents and children about the support they have received and the real changes they have experienced thanks to St.Giles.
As an editor, I’ve worked with the leaders at St.Giles to see what areas we can push and promote. And I've recently been lucky enough to join its dedicated and experienced board.
But my connection, like many people’s, is also personal.
My aunt was born with a condition called achondroplasia - a common form of dwarfism.
You might well imagine the difficulties a little girl growing up in the 1950s with such a condition would experience.
But thanks to St.Giles, she and my grandparents received support that was instrumental in her early years through the former school. She later went on to work in reception.
It is not hyperbole to say St.Giles is one of the organisations that we should be most proud of as a community.
We should encourage it, at every moment, to confound its aspirations with its abilities.
To raise those aspirations to seemingly impossible levels, knowing that in its staff, in its clients and in the support of the community, lies the means to achieve them.
“To find”, as the St.Giles motto so eloquently states, “the ability within”.
- Mark Baker is Australian Community Media - Tasmania managing editor