Kate Heine, resident of Yarraville and Managing Director of Heads Together for ABI. “I grew up in SA, but moved to Yarr…

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Resident of Yarraville

Managing Director of Heads Together for ABI

I grew up in SA, but moved to Yarraville 18 years ago after studying and working in America for 11 years. My brother was living in Yarraville, so I moved in with him and fell in love with the Ville. I hope I’ll be living here forever. I’m a kids physiotherapist, and have always specialised in children who have neurological problems.

Through my work with kids with Acquired Brain Injury (ABI), mostly from accidents, I came up with the idea of Heads Together back in 2002. I was running Heads Together out of our home for the last few years, but it just got a little hectic. My husband was taking some time off last year, and I had 2 people working in our home, and I didn’t want a house full while my husband had his time off, so we moved into Office Ours, a co-work space just up the road.

Heads Together for ABI provides a community for people with an ABI, and their families, that’s focused on positive stuff, having fun, making connections between kids, young adults and their families while sharing experiences. We are for people with an ABI but not about brain injury, there isn’t any therapy, just opportunities to connect and be part of a community of understanding.

Having a child with an ABI is traumatic and often involves a life-threatening event, and there’s the grief of losing the child you had before the injury, with the double whammy of coping with the injury and the recovery and having a child who isn’t the same as they were.

A challenge we’re interested in is educating people about ABI. There’s a lot of information out there for people who work in the field, along with books and research. We live within a medical system where it’s a ‘Health professionals are the experts’ whereas the model we are creating is about equality. In fact it’s flipping it and saying “Families are the experts”.

You get a better sense of the diversity of ABI when you see it at Heads Together. No one brain injury is the same, as it depends on which part of the brain was injured, as well as who you were before the injury, your experience and what kind of personality you had.

The wider public is not really exposed to what ABI is, as it’s often invisible, or confused with other types of conditions. It can look like someone doesn’t have an ABI as they move and talk just like you and I. Brain injury is usually a permanent injury, and it’s not like you just “get better”, you have to deal with the changes forever.

One of the best ways to see that diversity and the resilience of our community is through our family camps and social outings. We create opportunities for people and families who have ABI to come together, connect and grow.

Our camps run from Friday to Sunday, with around 20 families and 40 volunteers getting involved in good, old fashioned family fun. It’s like going camping with your family, there’s no technology, it’s about games and fun and outdoors stuff. We run camps at YMCA sites across Victoria.

Every family gets one or two volunteers over the weekend, and families love it. They get an additional family member who helps out with the kids, hangs out with them, lightens the load and has an all-round great time. And it’s a great chance for our volunteers to learn about ABI and how it really affects people and their families.

I find the whole language about disability really difficult. I don’t even like the word disability because it puts the focus on what people can’t do. I wish we could just talk about people having different conditions instead, because everyone has different abilities. Sometimes it’s hard not saying the word ‘normal’, as whether you like it or not, it’s how most people think. We’re about accepting difference and focusing on the positive.

It’s very liberating for the therapists who volunteer at Heads Together, as we don’t have to focus on “fixing” people. We just get to focus on the people. The filters are taken off, and we don’t look at what is wrong, just who they are.

This job has taught me so much about how to be a parent, a partner, and a good person and it’s such a privilege to be immersed in this community. “It’s so not about “helping” it’s about becoming part of a community who just get it and spending amazing times with some of the best people I know.’

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