Ben and APM Employment Services transcript

Ben: I'm Ben and I live here with my partner and 9-year-old daughter in the Bairnsdale region. At the age of 6 I was diagnosed with cancer which was quite aggressive and advanced. At the time I was given 10 days to live. For whatever reason, I survived three years of chemo and radiotherapy, and it's left me with about 6% vision in the left eye, total blindness in the right eye. When I left high school, I did an apprenticeship in fitting and turning. I was quite young, had all these hopes and dreams, and the main thing I seemed to come up against was people not wanting to see someone with a guide dog or a cane working on one of their machines. I think a lot of the time you just put into that ‘too hard basket’. You know, I did sort of go through a little bit of depression and things at the time, and when I started with APM it was a very different approach. They looked at the person as a whole rather than, you know, just someone to get off the list. Another number. It was just a breath of fresh air, really.

Kim: Sitting down with Ben, I actually found out he had quite a lot of skills and certificates up his sleeve, so he was really fantastic with his hands. Woodworking, pottery making, anything sort of technical.

Ben: She had a great idea about putting my art and my teaching and skills to good use. I've had a lot to do with the local community, a lot of voluntary work, working with people with severe disabilities, pretty much trying to do anything I can to, you know, breakdown those barriers between general community and people with disability or other issues.

Kim: We sat down with an employee here at the Hub. We discussed how us as APM can assist them as the employer if they were able to employ Ben. We offered a wage subsidy to assist in paying the wages to Ben, and we're able to get Ben set up with running his own class for the community and NDIS participants in teaching them how to make pottery. Then after a year we were able to get him back with APM and be employed by the Hub as a self-employed. So, now he runs his own classes under his own self-employed business.

Clint: You've got people from all different walks of life coming and enjoying what Ben does.

Danielle: No matter what your disability is, what your restrictions are, anything can be achieved. So, he's definitely an inspiration to all of us, that's for sure.

Kim: The change that I've seen in him, from when he very first got employed by the Hub, to now being self-employed is astounding.

Ben: There's a young girl on the spectrum, she's nonverbal, she didn't want to go to high school, didn't want to go to university. At the end of last year her mum came in and just in tears, thanking us because her daughter had brought home all these, you know, information about university courses do do with sculpture and ceramics. It's nice to know that you’ve been such a positive influence on someone so young and give them a direction of the future.

Kim: The one thing that I find I'm just so, so proud of, he is now able to buy a block of land, build his own house, and now has, I think, just hit a year living in his own home. I cannot be more proud of Ben, and I cannot wait to see what the future holds for him going forward.

Ben: It's really a dream come true.