Welcome. Meet Roel...

A few years ago, my 5 year old son Roel was diagnosed with Autism. While the diagnosis helped us to make sense of the behaviors we saw in young Roel, it still presented us with a seemingly insurmountable challenge – how were we going to cope as a family with a child that ‘suffers’ from this disorder?

Roel is now 8 and he has made wonderful progress. We don’t consider that he ‘suffers’ from Autism, rather, he behaves differently to most other kids and we need to provide him with an environment to help him to cope with the world around him.

Roel finds many things that we take for granter scary and intimidating. For example, he finds having a bath or walking into a multi-story building a stressful affair. Visa-versa, he can get so excited about riding on a train that the outing ends in a ‘meltdown’, where his ability to cope with the unfamiliar environment completely disintegrates.

Autism Support & Righteous Pups Australia

We have found the support for families in our situation is limited and largely under-funded. There is little Government assistance and resources such as appropriate schooling and cognitive therapy is difficult to source.

In our search for support, we have come across an organisation that provides Assistance Dogs for children with Autism – Righteous Pups Australia. The premise of the service is to give the recipient of the dog a greater level of independence, self esteem and an overall improvement in psychological well-being and quality of life. Immediately we saw that this could make an enormous difference to Roel’s life and to our entire family (we have two other children).

This service obviously comes at a cost - $29,000 per dog to be exact. RPA, a not-for-profit organisation, takes on the cost of rearing and training the dogs over a two year period and places the dogs at no cost to the recipient family. However, we felt that if it was within our ability to help raise the money then we were obliged to do so – after all, it is our child in need of such a dog.

Can you help?

We are looking for organisations, companies and individuals to assist in any way they can. This can be through the donation of money or a product that can be used for promoting this worthy service. For example:

A web-design company has donated their time to create a fundraiser web site. to help get the message out.
A personal contact has agreed to distribute the web site. link to around 5000 friends via his Social Network
PSI Screen Printing has agreed to provide us with a number of T-Shirts.
RosesOnly.com has donated a box of roses and a fruit basket to raffle off
DealsDirect has donated a gift voucher to raffle off

Any money we raise over and above the $29,000 will be donated back to RPA for the next family in need of a dog.

To donate to the funds, please go to our 'Donate' page
If you are able to help in other ways, please contact us and we'll be in touch as soon as we can.

If you are able to help, we will gladly place your business's logo on our Sponsors page in appreciation of your assistance. We hope that this small gesture will help you in return.

Where to from here?

Initially, we are focusing on raising funds for Roel’s dog, however, we plan to be ongoing supporters of RPA and would like to help them expand their operations all around Australia. We feel that the service they provide is of immense value to families like ours and will do whatever we can to ensure they can carry on their special work.

Again, I appreciate the time you took to read our web site. Now I’ll let Roel have the last word:

Us:            Roel, you know how you’re a little different to anyone?
Roel:         Yeah…
Us:            Would you like to have a special dog to help you at special times?
Roel:         YEAH!! YEEEAAAAHHH! I would like a black dog with a green ribbon!
Showing Roel the RPA web site.
Roel:         Ooohh. Shall we go then? Go there?
Us:            We have to wait. The puppies are in dog school.
Roel:         Why do they have to go to school?
Us:            They have to go to school to learn to be extra special
Roel:         Then can we pick one up?
Us:            We’re hoping we can pick one up for you soon. Would that be good?
Roel:         Yeah!

We thank you in advance for any help you are able to give us.

The Wijmans Family