Meet Ben Feenan

People sometimes ask me why I'm so passionate about this work. The honest answer is one family, one participant, and one of the first supported homes I ever worked in.

It was a brand new house. The participants were all moving in for the first time, and one of them was a young man about my age. He'd been living with his aging parents his whole life, and they'd made this incredibly brave decision to, in their words, "let their son go." They knew they wouldn't be around forever, and they wanted to make sure he'd be okay when that day came.

The anxiety was through the roof for everyone. His parents were terrified. Terrified he wouldn't be cared for properly, terrified his routine would fall apart, terrified they were making a mistake. And honestly, those fears were completely legitimate. This was their boy. Everything he'd ever known was changing.

But we built a rapport, him and me. A really strong one. We went grocery shopping together, something his parents never thought he'd do. We went on walks around the neighbourhood. We cooked dinner side by side. Slowly, bit by bit, his world started opening up in ways nobody expected.

Before I moved on from that home, his parents came to me and thanked me for caring for their little boy. I won't lie, I cried. And I cried again later when I heard he wasn't coping well after I'd left.

That experience has stayed with me every single day since. It's the reason I'm building Asina. Because out in the field, I can only be there for a few people at a time. But by starting something new, by setting the culture and the values from day one, I can make sure that kind of care reaches hundreds of families.