The highlight of the day was the release of butterflies and celebrating the new 46m Bronto Skylift working platform fitted to Summit Tower Hire’s new Scania 6×6.
Jamie-Lee Lewis, at 23, inherits her sporting genes from her legendary rugby league champion father “The King” Wally Lewis, and she was the first deaf person to represent Australia in a national sporting team, playing water polo for Australia.
Her involvement with the Hear and Say Centre started when she was a child as one of the first group of five children to participate in the program 22 years ago.
“I was one of the founding children of the Hear and Say Centre and it has made a big impact on my life,” she said. “It has given me the encouragement and strength to do whatever I want.”
She is leading by example as the Ambassador of Project Possibility for Deaf Sports Australia’s Active Deaf Kids program.
“At the moment I am going interstate and getting kids involved in sport and letting them know that being deaf doesn’t have to stop them being involved,” Ms Lewis said.
She said the Hear and Say organisation has come a very long way since she started 22 years ago growing from five families to almost 600 hundred families who now participate in the program.
Ms Lewis received her Cochlear implant at four years of age. The Hear and Say Centre helped her and her family before and after the implant to learn to hear and talk and essentially normalising her life with deafness to open up a world of possibilities…very much like the organisation has done for many more families and children ever since.
Summit Tower Hire chooses to support charities that support members of its own staff’s families. In this case Safety, Training and Technical Manager Peter Wellspring and his wife Shelley have been involved in the centre with their daughter Abbie, now 12, since she first had the Cochlear implant when she was only 15 months old.
Wellspring said the job of Hear and Say Centre was amazing and the support network provided feels like a big family.
Hear and Say Chief Executive officer Chris McCarthy said the naming of the Butterfly Appeal is named after butterflies because, as a little known fact, they are deaf.
“We liken our deaf children learning to hear and speak to a butterfly emerging from a cocoon of silence into a beautiful, colourful, rich world of sound,” he said.
“As we enter our 22nd year of operation we have a generation of Hear and Say listening and speaking deaf children who have had the worlds of communication made available to them. The worlds of education, wider career choices, family connection and social inclusion – today the future is in their hands,” he said.
The Scania on show was a brandnew P 400 6×6, one of two that arrived in the past few weeks, heading off to work in WA in the near future. It is fitted with a Bronto Skylift elevated work platform.
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