For paralympic gold medallist, world champion and Australian of the Year Dylan Alcott OAM, he wouldn’t change a thing.
“For every one thing that I can’t do, there are ten thousand other things that I can do,” he told the crowd at the Property Council’s annual Property Congress, this year taking place in Hobart.
“And I’m easily the luckiest person in this room today if not this world to be living the life that I live, …I would not change that for the world.”
Alcott spent the first three and a half years of his life in and out of the hospital due to a tumour coiled around his spinal cord.
Alcott represented Australia in wheelchair basketball at the 2008 Beijing Olympics when he was 17 years old. Among his biggest accomplishments was winning the gold medal.
Later, he joined the global tennis tours, where he won 15 Grand Slam singles titles. He became one of just a few competitors to win gold medals in two separate sports at the Rio Paralympics.
He founded the Dylan Alcott Foundation to assist young Australians in reaching their full potential, and in 2018, he hosted Abilityfest, the country’s only truly inclusive, fully accessible music event.
At The Property Congress, Alcott called on property industry leaders to help make an impact on someone’s life through the built environment.
“I promise, you have life changing impact on people if you care about being inclusive and accessible,” he said.
Alcott told the crowd that including accessibility features in property “for the warm and fuzzys” was good but offered a different framing; “You should really do it to make money”.
“It is good business if you are accessible and inclusive,” he said. “And there’s nothing wrong with that because we want to be consumers too.
“But you’ve got to do it from the ground up to start, when you retrofit or not care about it, it’s more costly.
“One in four people have a disability, and they can be consumers like everybody else, but if we get left out of the market, we can’t.
“Making a sensory room within a huge corporate building will cost you nothing but actually change someone’s life.
“Accessibility when done right makes everybody’s life better.”