Killarney resident Mandy Latimore honoured for her fight for the rights of people with disabilities

Killarney resident Mandy Latimore, who describes herself as an adrenaline junkie and activist for the rights of people living with disabilities, believes that a person is a person and must be considered as such before being labelled as disabled.

“At 59, I may be an ageing adrenaline junkie and activist but I still pack a punch when it comes to crusading for the rights of those living with disabilities. I will not make any apologies on that score,” Latimore said.

“I believe we’re all equal as human beings before any disability. A person is person first and their disability comes last, and they must always be considered as human beings before any labels are attached to them.”

Latimore lives with a disability after what she described as ‘a silly accident’ at age 19 whereon she slipped on a wet rock while climbing, an accident that has confined her to a wheelchair for the last 40 years.

She broke her back and became permanently disabled way back in 1979 and her hardships since then to access facilities turned this soft-spoken sportswoman into a ‘verbal puncher’ of note in her crusade for equal access to facilities and opportunities for the disabled.

Back then, Latimore recalls an astonishing fact of limited access to opportunities and facilities for people living with disabilities. “The accident made me come to realise that there were few to no facilities at all for people with disabilities in those days, and so I sprang into action.”

She has worked for many years looking at access in the built environment, and fighting for the rights of people with disabilities in all the different sectors of sports and economic activities and in life in general, including accessing justice.

Having been a sportswoman with a penchant for extreme sports, Latimore decided to make sports available to people with disabilities – and nothing was going to stop her in her fight on this frontier either.

She was part of various teams that created sporting codes for different sports within the disability sector and she also participated and played in most of these sports, such as waterskiing, flying (she personally did wing walking), aerobics, sailing, scuba diving, rowing and snow skiing.

Latimore is the founder and specialist consultant for her Access Universal Solutions (Pty) Ltd which looks at access in the built environments for people with disabilities in sectors such as the hospitality industry, tourism, the corporate world, and in private homes as well.

Having slowed down a bit on the sporting front in her 40th year of disability, Latimore now concentrates on sailing and lawn bowls, the latter of which she maintains is a great sport for anyone and everyone of any age or ability.

Her favourite motto for aspiring sportsmen and women is: ‘First you dream and then you fly’ and in order to do that one has to always think outside the box to make things happen.

This illustrious sportswoman and rights activist was recently nominated for the 2019 Gauteng Disability Rights Excellence Award by the Gauteng Provincial Government and honoured with a Lifetime Achiever Award.

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https://northeasterntribune.co.za/248651/let-us-assist-has-all-the-help/