"Paul Young started his life in North Sydney, one of six children, five of them disabled, physically or mentally or both.  People told him he was different before he even knew he had cerebral palsy or was “mentally challenged.” … His friend, Nina Kirby says “If there was another Martin Luther King Jr., honestly, for people working with disabilities, that would be Paul Young. I couldn’t imagine a world without a Paul Young in it. He says he’s not special but definitely he is.”

 

“Special” had a more negative meaning when Young attended a “retarded class” at a Sydney high school or travelled on the “retarded” school bus. Or later worked in a “sheltered workshop” for people with developmental disabilities.

 

But everything changed in the late 1970’s and early ‘80’s when key mentors helped him turn his almost life-long love of music into jobs at Sydney radio stations CHER and CBC where he worked as an audio technician. The confidence he gained there propelled him into the disability rights movement, fighting for everything from deinstitutionalization to the elimination of all the labels that don’t put “people first.”

 

Young eventually founded the advocacy group People First of Nova Scotia, co-founded a national group by the same name and has been the only person with a developmental disability to chair Council of Canadians with Disabilities.

 

He’s spoken about his life – the rights and the potential of everyone – to groups across the globe including the World Health Organization. But Kirby says he touches lives in even smaller settings, like an anti-bullying talk he gave to local high school students last spring.  Some of them wanted to become social workers because of him…One comment was, ‘I want to be just like you.’"

 

(from an article in the Herald Magazine (Winter) by Lois Legge)