Gay Sweeney spent her working life finding her voice, first on the airwaves, then in public relations, coaxing other people's stories into shape. These days, she's telling her own. 

Gay has chosen to leave a gift in her Will to Top of the South Community Foundation, in support of the Brain Injury Top of the South and West Coast. Specifically, she wants her gift to help fund an ongoing part-time support role serving West Coast and Buller, ensuring people living with brain injury have access to local support, connection, and someone to turn to when they need it. It's a practical answer to a gap she has seen firsthand, in a community where people recovering from brain injury can be left feeling forgotten and alone. 

“I hope my gift helps negate that sense of hopelessness and isolation that people feel,” she says.

A voice before the silence 

Gay grew up in New Plymouth, the daughter of two teachers, and fell into broadcasting almost by accident. She went on to work across New Zealand radio and television, and for a time the BBC in London, before building a long career back home in Nelson and Wellington, and later in public relations. 

Then a serious brain injury changed everything. Gay has no memory of the accident itself, only fragments, and spent several days unconscious. What followed was years of learning to live differently. 

“Brain injury is often called the silent affliction,” she says. “People look at you and think you're fine, but they can't see what you're dealing with. People living with brain injuries have lost the life they knew. They have to invent a new one.” 

Healing in the quiet 

Looking for somewhere quiet to heal, Gay eventually settled on the West Coast, first on a remote forest property, later in the small township of Ngakawau. It gave her space, time, and a small circle of people who stood by her. 

“People have given so much to me,” she says. “I wouldn't have survived some of life's challenges without the kindness, generosity and belief of others.” 

It was also on the coast that Gay saw how thin local support for brain injury really was; small groups meeting without anyone to lead them. That gap has stayed with her ever since, and it's exactly what her gift is designed to help close. She has since joined the board of the Brain Injury Trust herself, bringing her own experience to the table. 

Small joys, hard won 

Recovery, Gay says, has never been all one thing. Alongside the harder years there's been music, always, and more recently an afternoon at the movies with a friend from her Nelson apartment block, catching the free bus into town to see an Italian film about an orchestra of orphaned girls. Small, ordinary pleasures, and proof enough, in their own way, that she's built a life worth living.

Gay now lives in Nelson, the city she first came to as a young broadcaster decades ago. With her gift in place, there's a stillness to how she talks about the future now. “I feel at peace now that I've done it, and I know it's going to be used.”

September is Wills Month 

Gay feels a sense of peace now that she’s established the gift in her will with Top of the South Community Foundation, knowing her wishes are settled and will one day quietly carry on the support she's put her name to. Like Gay, this September you can take the same step. Leave a gift in your Will, of any size, and let Top of the South Community Foundation grow it into an ongoing source of funding for the causes you care about, for generations to come.