 I was told that I wasn't going to be able to have a job because of my diversity. Sometimes you feel defeated because well why should I believe in myself when no one here believes in me? I was like you know what I refuse to take that as an answer and I don't know when and I don't know how but I'm gonna prove your own. And so I did. My name is Kayla Finney and I'm a self-advocate here in Kamloops, BC. My relationship with Sarah, first of all, she's rad. She's so exciting. Yeah, she's hilarious. Kayla came to my office and with one of her community inclusion workers, you get some help through another community organization and builds a business plan. I helped facilitate that process with her. The second part was collaborating with CLBC to make sure that we weren't duplicating any services. I was brand new at the time to the vocational counselor role and I thought it was just really important to collaborate because I didn't know what they did. They didn't know what I could do so we had to get together and kind of figure out how to move her forward in her goals. CLBC is a crown agency and our mandate is to provide services and supports to adults that are labeled with a developmental disability. My job in particular is to travel around the province and to listen to and learn from the people that we serve and to find out what's important to them and to hear their stories and to weave their voice into community and into what we do as an organization. And that's pretty much how I met Kayla. Kayla had a goal of becoming a motivational speaker to share her path, her journey, her personal stories with the purpose of changing how people think and achieve their full potential. And she got connected to her local CLBC office in Kamloops, where she got a CLBC facilitator named Karen. And Karen's job was to connect Kayla to both disability-related supports but also to the broader community, to places like Work PC, to other allies, to myself, to some of Kayla's personal support network, and she brought us together as a team to meet regularly to talk about what we could all do to help Kayla reach her career path. She's on her way and I really think it's because of lots of different people and different ideas all coming together to help her achieve that. There were times when I was by myself even that I was like great I have all these great ideas but I have nowhere to put them so like I couldn't just write all my ideas down. Through the EPPC program we were able to put her through an ergonomic assessment. She's now getting the proper equipment that she needs. Say if I can't type or my arms are tired I can speak into my computer and it'll type it out for me. Don't be afraid to go out there and collaborate with everybody involved. I think it's super important to be able to move the client forward with their goal and just get on board and get the whole picture of the client and able to help them you know achieve their goal. I was told that I wasn't gonna be able to go to university because of how much help I needed in high school. I graduated university and I had the best shop in the world. I go around empowering people to be the very best that they can be. And I tell people all the time that may seem kind of impossible but if you just kind of take a leap of faith and take a deep breath and just jump it'll happen.