About
Name
Mitch
Age
25
Work
Primary School Teacher
Location
Hume
Pronouns
He/Him
There can be anxiety around joining new groups but when you step into one that is safe and supportive those sort of thoughts and anxieties sort of dissipate and disappear.
For Mitch as a kid, activity meant traditional sports like basketball, tennis and cricket. But you were "always competing against another person or team to get a ranking".
At 25, as a teacher and huge yoga fan, he's realised, "there's no reason to say that physical movement is defined as one thing."
"I know there's a lot of anxiety around joining a new club or new community, or even when you join a gym, you don't know what you're doing,'' he says, "but there's so many more ways that we can be physically active!"
Mitch wants every young person across Victoria to be able to connect with a community through activity.
"What I wouldn't want to see in the future is young Victorians denied access to any form of physical movement," he says. So when we design public spaces, "we shouldn't be thinking about the majority, it should be about the minority".
"The first thing I think of is somebody in a wheelchair not able to participate in a yoga class because they don't have ramp facilities or a space that can fit their wheelchair.
"You can complete the same poses as everyone else. It just might be modified or altered. A modified movement should never be discouraged or frowned upon because of how someone presents themselves."