Admire Mukupe won Gellibrand’s 2025 Client Wellbeing Award. A humble man, putting clients first comes natural to him as he places care at the centre of everything he does.
After Admire Mukupe won Gellibrand’s 2025 Client Wellbeing Award, he said he’d always felt appreciated for his work but that it felt good to get the extra recognition.
“It was just confirmation that I might be going in the right direction,” he smiled when I met him at Gellibrand’s Honey Grove site where he was on an ISP shift.
Admire has been a Gellibrand support worker for eleven years, but his career direction has always been about caring for people. When he moved to Australia from Zimbabwe at the end of secondary school, he studied for and received a Community Development degree. But he wanted to work directly with people – and learn more about them – so he studied again, this time for an Advanced Diploma in Disability.
Before coming to Gellibrand, Admire worked in the government sector in disability and with some large support providers. He said Gellibrand’s commitment to people was the main difference between his current and previous employers.
“Some big operators have mass volumes of clients. So, more often, clients are treated as a number rather than from an individual perspective. That’s something that I didn’t want. I felt the systems in place were not there to benefit clients. It was just to keep things calm.”
Whereas other employers sometimes discouraged him from taking clients out during shifts, he said Gellibrand’s policy is vastly different. If a client wants to do something – and they will be safe – then Admire knows the outing can be trialled.
“I took one client on a train ride for the first time,” he said, adding that the client became a little nervous when boarding due to the gap between platform and carriage. “But once we got on, he was all smiles, all day. We went to Williamstown, then did a Yarra River cruise and caught a train back. The smile and the happiness he showed that day gave me confirmation we were doing the right thing.”
Admire said paperwork and client notes at other organisations were often limited. At Gellibrand, he has had a lot more paperwork to do, something he knows is all about ensuring clients are put first.
“Everything we do at Gellibrand has a purpose,” he said. It’s not surprising that Admire enjoys that part of Gellibrand’s identity because he is a purpose-driven man, even in his personal life.
“I’m an avid gardener and I love preserving foods, like sun drying tomatoes and fish, making jerky – anything,” he said. “I’m building my knowledge of modern-day gardening techniques using small space to grow food organically, towards being self-sustaining and having less reliance on supermarkets.”
Admire likes to keep things simple, but his 2025 Client Wellbeing Award shows his simple approach is highly effective. He’s likewise clear and humble in his advice for anyone thinking of taking up disability support work.
“You don’t have to be perfect. This is a caring profession, and caring is at the centre of what we do. So that has to be the main driver of why we do this job. As long as you centre your work around care and support for the client, that’s the most important thing. Everything else will kind of fall into place.”
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