Therapy Focus Part 2

Hey guys! It's come to the tail-end of my internship and believe it or not, it slipped my mind completely about posting blogs on updates of what I've been doing! (Megan, if you're reading this - Thank you so much for the reminder!)

So buckle up, because Part Two of my blogpost is on two funtastic (yes, read FUNtastic!) events Therapy Focus was part of over the past few months.

City of South Perth Fit 'n' Fun Day
As part of our ongoing awareness creation and fundraising campaigns, Therapy Focus was given a booth at the City of South Perth Fit 'n' Fun Day at the George Burnett Leisure Centre on Manning Road. It was the first week of our placement, so we were geared with excitement for this event. The pre-planning and packing of event boxes were done two days before, so Megan & I went through the PR & Marketing cupboard with a checklist of what we needed to pack in hand - we familiarized ourselves with where things were around the office. As we loaded things into the car and stuffed Sunny the Sunflower (our lovely mascot!) into the back seat, we were more than prepared for Sunday's event.

Upon arrival, we set up our booth with the Arts & Craft Table, Face Painting Corner, Obstacle Course as well as the Promotions table. With great support from the Therapy Focus volunteers (we had a great turnout that day), we had smiley kids running around creating amazing art work, getting their faces painted by excellent volunteers and enjoying the obstacle course that we set up. It was a fantastic kick-start to our placement as we had a rough idea of what we were going to do for the next couple of weeks.

Garden Week 2011

Garden Week is a yearly event that was held at the Perry Lakes Reserve in Floreat this year. The week-long event features most of WA's "garden-based" businesses and Therapy Focus was proud to be part of the "Make a Friend for Sunny the Sunflower" competition. Open to all primary schools around the Perth metropolitan area, the competition is for children to create a friend for our mascot, Sunny the Sunflower. Visitors at Garden Week were given the opportunity to vote for their best scarecrow.

My role for Garden Week was to ensure that we had enough volunteers to help us throughout the week. After a few emails and calls, I fnalized the volunteer list and was left "volunteer-less" only on the last day. So I decided to make things alot easier and get into Sunny's suit myself! The suit was a little too big for me, but with help from Megan I managed to not trip over and make a complete fool out of myself. :)

Therapy Focus was also given the opportunity to be featured on Channel 10's 7PM Project live from Garden Week. It lasted for just under a minute, but that publicity was enough to tell the rest of Australia that Therapy Focus was at Garden Week!

After rounding up the votes, Scarborough Beach Primary School's Recycle Michael won the competition. They were also my personal favorite as I was amazed with the level of creativity the kids had, and also because I'm very much of a tree hugger - the kids used nothing but recycled items to create him.

Throughout the week of sitting at our booth, I learnt that disability is not something rare. We had a number of people who stopped by our booth, either to support us with some donation or just for a chat but most of them had a family member with a disability or knew of someone with a disability. What hit me the most is when I realized that people here (by here, I mean Australia), go all out to create the awareness and educate the community on children with disabilities, to ensure that they are not treated differently and to help with support and services that will ensure the child leads a life as normal as possible. A little something countries like Malaysia should learn from and I say this because I am from Malaysia and have grown up volunteering for various causes but never have I seen so many people take such serious initiatives to create awareness and help children who need the help.

So there you have it, two FUNtastic events! Look out for my next post, which will feature Therapy Focus' Garden Party to mark the end of our Symphony of Sunflowers campaign. Till then, I hope everyone's had an amazing time at their placements and like me, are eager to get to the end of our Undergraduate journey.