Brandon King

Youth Relations & Life Skills Manager
Director
Operations Manager - India

Brandon King is a former (and future) blind Canadian Paralympic athlete, a 100 meter, 200 meter, and 400 meter Canadian champion, as well a performance dancer. He now does work with RYBLT, and joined us for a special post on his life and how RYBLT has effected it:

“As someone who grew up with a visual disability and didn’t really know what it was like to be “normal”, I learned the expectations for the blind early. No one expects us to not be functional, productive members of society, but they definitely don’t expect us to be…high functioning members of society.

All my life, I’ve set out to change this expectation, and to defy the metric of success that society sets for the visually impaired. Like many other people who are visually impaired, I’ve made a point to work twice as hard to achieve what a seeing person would consider average success, and then go one step further. Athletics was a big part of this for me. Training every day, training harder than I thought I ever could, and then training some more…that was a physical imperative for me, one that paid off when I competed at the Olympic Games. I drew on artistic impression through my physical training, becoming an accomplished dancer and performing in front of hundreds. Not just accomplished for a blind person, but for anyone. (Seriously, at the risk of sounding like I’m bragging, I can definitely cut a rug around you. Just try me!)

But when it came to professional, intellectual, career development, I often found myself pushed into corners and forced into hard times. It’s hard to train, or hire, or accept a blind person for full career jobs. These are the types of jobs that guarantee food on the table and that guarantee a sustainable kind of living. And finding employment here was nearly impossible for me.

That was until RYBLT came along. Ehsan Khandaker, the founder and president of RYBLT, saw something in me that few people saw…that I had something valuable to contribute to his organization. Something that superseded the pencil pushing kind of work I was looking for and still developed me and my strengths professionally.

I was given the job of ambassador for RYBLT. This meant I could go spread the RYBLT message, one of achieving your goals no matter the odds, and working on yourself 365 days a year, to various schools in the Peel Region through in-class seminars. It meant I could interact with all sorts of kids, and “open their eyes” to the fact that so much is possible, if you just put your mind to it.

Gaya Nagendra

Manager Administration &
Outreach Coordinator

An experienced community activist who is valuable to CELSN because of her first-hand- knowledge of what young students face in Canada. She runs the Practicum programs for foreign and local students from various colleges and technical institutions. Gaya organizes youth volunteers and employment placements under the Canada summer jobs program and liaison between employment center and training service providers.

Gaya is a self-starter & self-taught, highly skilled community activist. She is a practicing Community Service Worker, in the Region of Peel in the province of Ontario. She has been in the field of Social Work for the past 15 years. She came from a background of working in the Business field. Her life took a turn in 2002 when she went to volunteer in her native Sri Lanka during the ceasefire period.

During this time she volunteered in a variety of settings from working with school aged children to young mothers, this was a life changing experience for her. After returning to Canada she furthered her post-secondary education in Community Service Work, Group facilitation, Addictions counselling, and adult education to work with a variety of clients, she also has networking outreach and marketing skills to promote programs and services in the community, she has been specializing in recruiting students from South India Malaysia Singapore and Sri Lanka.

Besides her professional practice she engages with a variety of groups in Peel and the Greater Toronto Area (GTA), to work on issues that affect the greater community at large. She is fulfilled in what she does and she never looked back. Gaya believes; being positive is the first step to achieving success in life. She continues to grow both in her professional and personal life by reading and meeting inspiring people.