Inspirational Speech by Bill Shorten

The following speech was made by Bill Shorten at the Special Olympics dinner held on Friday August 28th.  I really appreciated the speech and I hope that you do as well.

You must be thinking, oh my goodness, what could a junior minister in the Rudd Government have to say that could provoke your interest on such a fantastic night.

Well first of all I would like to acknowledge the traditional owners of the land and I would like to thank Special Olympics Sydney Upper North Shore for inviting me.

The first thing I would like to say is that I congratulate Mel Eustace on her award.  It was fantastic.

I don’t know what set of circumstances brings you each here tonight.  It could be a family reason, it could be a notion of just giving back to your community.  It could be that you’ve accidentally come across Special Olympics and once touched, you can never let it go, because it is so special.  Read more

2009 Special Olympics Australia National Conference

The 2009 Special Olympics Australia (SOA) National Conference, themed Let’s Grow Together, was held on the 2nd and 3rd of April.  Jack Bahng, John Goo, Sue Teale, Ivy Tang, Paul Phelan, Ian Hyman and I travelled to my hometown Adelaide for the conference.  Arriving on Friday, we had the opportunity to visit venues for the 2010 national Games also being held in Adelaide.  The strong themes from the conference revolved around a focus on our athletes, growth in our program through positive change and quality sports competition and the 2010 National Games.

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Website Launch

Greg Simmons - Chairman

Its with much anticipation that the Special Olympics Sydney Upper North Shore Region launches its new website. We are very excited about the possibilities it brings.

The key goals in launching our new website are to:

• Be Inspired – To Help Our Athletes to Reach Their Potential
• Provide an readily accessible source of information to our Athlete’s, Parents/Carers, Coaches and Volunteers
• Build our community - it touches so many individuals and organisations so lets harness that energy to do great things
• To recognise and say thank you to our sponsors without whom this would not be possible – this is an avenue to express our heart felt THANKS!

SO… how do we see our new website achieving these goals?: Read more