As North-East ambassador for the young persons’ disabled group Trailblazers, Jennifer Gallacher hopes to challenge perceptions and improve services. Sarah Foster meets her.

JENNIFER GALLACHER presses buttons and twiddles knobs on her battery-powered wheelchair. It’s highly responsive – the slightest touch and she’s off – and she’s happy to admit she would hate to be without it. She does have a manual wheelchair, but doesn’t like to use it.

The problem is, it requires assistance and, for Jennifer, this is distinctly unappealing. “I don’t like people pushing me,” she says with a smile. “I like to be independent.”

At 26, she is a cheerful, confident young woman, with a part-time job as a teaching assistant, plenty of friends and a loving family.

The only thing that sets Jennifer apart is an accident of genetics – a condition called spinal muscular atrophy which, since the age of nine, has left her wheelchair-bound. “It stops the communication between your brain and muscles so you get muscle wastage, which ends up so you can’t walk,” she explains.

Jennifer’s disability comes under the umbrella of the Muscular Dystrophy Campaign, a charity focusing on muscle disease, and she belongs to a local branch. It was through this that she found out about Trailblazers, a new initiative for young people.

“In December, people from around the country got together at the Muscular Dystrophy headquarters in London and that was the chance for us to find out more about Trailblazers and meet other people who had the same feelings about disability. We had training on media skills, a bit of computing and the language to use when putting together things like press releases, to be able to go out and put a campaign together.”

Aimed at 16 to 30-year-olds, the group is open to both the disabled and able-bodied, and hopes to bring positive changes for anyone facing physical challenges. Although in its early days, it plans to tackle a wide range of topics, from the practical to the ideological, with the young people themselves at the forefront of campaigns.

When Jennifer first heard about it, she jumped at the chance of signing up.

“People at Trailblazers rang and said ‘How involved do you want to be? Do you want to be at the forefront of the action?’,” she says. “It’s good to get the issues out there, so I was quite happy to get involved as much as I possibly could.”

She may be bright and bubbly to talk to, but Jennifer, who lives in Nunthorpe, in Middlesbrough, knows only too well the difficulties faced by disabled people. Her school days weren’t bad – she feels that she was treated pretty well – and yet her wheelchair was a barrier.

This meant that in her final year of primary school at The Avenue, in Nunthorpe, and despite being academically able, she transferred to a nearby special school. The problem was a lack of accessibility. “I was finding it difficult getting around the classroom because, as I got older, I became more weak and less able to move around,” she explains. “We did fight for me to stay at The Avenue and for half a week I went to one school and half the other, but in the end I thought ‘this is silly’.”

Perhaps surprisingly, Jennifer sounds resigned – as if she has long since decided that some battles are not worth fighting. This was exactly how she felt when she was barred from teacher training. Despite a degree in Childhood And The Arts from Durham University, she was unable to win a place on a teacher training course. As becoming a teacher was her dream, she was understandably frustrated. “I applied for teacher training courses and got as far as the interview stages, but didn’t get any further,” she says.

It is a testament to Jennifer’s character that she did find a route into teaching. “I was getting sick of applying so I thought ‘Right, I’ll be a teaching assistant then. If I can’t be a teacher it’s the next best thing’. I already had enough qualifications so I applied for jobs. I got turned down so then I was really tearing my hair out. I went to Pennyman Primary, where I had been on work experience quite a number of times, and said ‘Can I come in voluntarily?’”

Jennifer chose the school because it takes disabled pupils and so is wheelchair accessible. She was there less than a month before she was offered a permanent job, and five years later, is still loving it.

As North-East ambassador for Trailblazers she hopes to help eliminate the obstacles for future generations. Her first task is looking at transport. “We have put together a nationwide survey that’s been sent out to Trailblazers across the country and we are doing what’s called secret passengers surveys,” she says. “It’s about using public transport and seeing how accessible it actually is for wheelchair users or people with limited ability.”

What Jennifer is keen to stress is that even if, in practical terms, things were perfect for the disabled, there is still a long way to go with attitudes.

She talks of minor, everyday slights – of people turning away when she is struggling to get through a door; of the fed-up look on the taxi driver’s face when he has to help her get onboard. It is this, above all else, that she would love to change. “It’s all right having access, but if people still look at you and have the impression that you shouldn’t have it, or think ‘I’m not going to bother with someone in a wheelchair’, then that’s what we have to change.”

She may have high ideals, but she is nothing if not a realist. If, through Trailblazers, she can at least make something happen, even if it’s only tinkering at the edges, then that will be enough for her. “We know we can’t change the world – it’s not going to happen,” says Jennifer.

“But if something can be done just a little bit better, then that’s got to be better than nothing.”

■ For more information visit mdctrailblazers.org or ring 0207-803-4807