‘I’m not the problem’: Celebrating five years of the National Disabled Students Association and tertiary advocacy

For some of us, our time at university consisted of missing lectures because of broken lifts, leaving classes early due to appointments and O-Week fomo because of inaccessible venues.

That's why, five years ago, law student Alice Mander decided she’d had enough of these barriers and the National Disabled Students Association (NDSA) was established to push back against the structural barriers.

On top of studying law, sociology and film studies at Victoria University in 2019, Mander was schooling herself to start an association from scratch which she describes as “learning by fire”.

Although they had a lot of support from other organisations like Te Mana Ākonga (the National Māori Tertiary Students' Association) and the international students group, NDSA was “learning to run, before we learnt to walk,” Mander says.

“It was really tough starting an association. Just knowing all the administrative things that always trip these student groups up that are kind of necessary in the long run, but can just be really difficult at times,” she says. “We were trying to operate at the same level as these associations that have way more money and way more years of experience.”  

The magic of disabled people coming together

Once things were coming together for NDSA, there was a special magic whenever students gathered together. One of Mander’s highlights in those early days was bringing together disabled students at Canterbury University and the University of Auckland.

“For a lot of these students, it was the first time for them to be in the same room together. And it was kind of amazing because at first everyone starts off quite quiet and nervous and for a lot of them, they probably just also had never been around that many other disabled people in an environment that was very exclusively for them,” Mander says. 

“They started to share their stories and their experiences and you could see that moment where they realised their experience was not unfortunately unique. All these things they were coming up against, other disabled students were also coming up against.”

“And it was like quite a cool consciousness-raising thing to see. Just seeing students realise, ‘oh shit, it's not actually me that's the problem. And it's clearly something wrong with the structure of this university that means that me and this other group of people are struggling with the same issues,’ and that was just really cool,” she says.

Mander was the association president in 2021 and co-president in 2022, but has stepped away from leadership positions in the organisation as she paves a career as a solicitor in the litigation team at Simpson Grierson.

Although she’s not as involved now, she loves celebrating the organisation’s achievements and seeing new faces. “In the disability space, there's a bit of a bubble sometimes where you see the same names. So it’s a win when it's like, ‘oh, actually there's this whole new group of disabled young leaders that I don't know yet’.”

The next wave of leadership

The incoming co-presidents Nikki Van Dijk (Ngāti Kahungunu) and Eloise Fleming are excited to continue advocating for and equipping disabled students to thrive at university. 

Looking ahead in 2025, one of their first projects is designing an accessible O-Week programme which doesn't include foam parties, and instead incorporates online sessions for students who can’t be on campus. 

“We recognise that whether it's because disabled students are having to work more during the day or they're caring for other people or they're in and out of hospital appointments, they can't make it onto campus 'cause also a lot of campuses are not accessible,” Van Dijk says. 

“We might not be able to provide Red Bull, but you can at least access the events, which is the thing that most universities have failed to do,” Fleming says. 

More broadly, both Van Dijk and Fleming want to see the disabled student community strengthened. Van Dijk specifically hopes to see more unity between different disability groups because we’re “almost segregated”. 

“Everything either seems to be catered to only neurodivergent students or only chronically ill students, and I want to be able to see us all come together as one disabled community to be able to share resources but also make friendships crossing the disability divide,” says Van Dijk.

Fleming shares this vision. “Despite all of us having all these different backgrounds and experiences, and so many of us with also intersectional experiences, where regardless of what the political situation is, we've got a place where we can have some hope, some community, and somewhere we can go for support and that we know that there's still a path forward,” they say.

“I'm very excited that we will hopefully have a sustainable organisation that’s actually providing for students and ensuring students also get the chance to shape our organisation,” Fleming says. “That they give us their voice, provide their voice and tell us the directions they would like us to go in, acknowledging their own personal experiences and needs, and providing a unified front.”

Van Dijk recognises the organisation has come a long way in five years and it’s worth “celebrating the power of disabled student voices”.

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