Petua Bakwesegha-Summersby has spent her career asking one question that keeps reshaping how she sees people: what is this behaviour trying to tell us?
The Ugandan-born Behaviour Support Practitioner, international speaker and disability inclusion advocate, now based in Darwin, Australia, has built a career around that single idea, that behaviour is communication. As the Founder of Heartward House, an NDIS-registered organisation delivering trauma-informed Positive Behaviour Support and employment services to children, adolescents and adults with complex support needs, she has taken that philosophy into schools, homes and the forensic support space, and increasingly, onto international stages.
Her work recently earned her a place on Titanium Magazine’s “Top 50 Global Inspirational Women to Look Out For 2027,” an honour recognised in Marrakech, Morocco. But long before the accolades, the foundation for that work was laid in a childhood spent across continents, shaped by discipline, faith and a quiet, early ache to be truly seen.
A childhood between three worlds
Born in Kenya to two diplomats and raised across Ethiopia and later the United States before settling in Uganda, Bakwesegha-Summersby describes a household where standards were never negotiable.
“Ours was a very disciplined household, where there was always an awareness that we represented not only our family, but also the values and principles that came with my parents’ work,” she says. Her father, she recalls, would occasionally arrive unannounced at her school simply to check that she was upholding the values instilled at home. Her mother’s faith gave the family its spiritual anchor.
That structure produced a child who thrived in leadership, from Patrol Leader at Wicoff School in New Jersey to Head Girl at Taibah Junior School and Deputy Head Girl at Kabojja in Uganda. But Bakwesegha-Summersby is candid that the confident exterior did not tell the whole story.
“My teachers seemed to see something in me that I could not always see in myself,” she says. “They saw the fears I carried, the moments when I was uncertain of myself, and perhaps some of the things I was navigating outside the classroom.”
The loneliness that became a calling
It is this tension, between what a person presents and what they are actually carrying, that would eventually define her professional purpose. Bakwesegha-Summersby says her earliest understanding of advocacy came from her own experience of not always feeling seen.
“I experienced periods growing up where I felt incredibly lonely, uncertain and unseen,” she explains. “For a long time, I carried a deep sense of loneliness and uncertainty. On the outside, I could function, achieve, lead and appear confident, while internally there were parts of me that simply wanted to be noticed, understood and cared for.”
Rather than harden her, she says those years became “one of the greatest sources of empathy in my life,” sharpening her instinct for people who are overlooked or reduced to their behaviour rather than understood for what lies beneath it. Studying behaviour and disability later gave her a framework, attachment theory, to make sense of what she had lived through.
“Secure attachment is not simply about being physically present for someone,” she says. “It is about being seen from the inside out. It is about feeling held, understood, comforted and safe enough to rest, to play, to explore and ultimately to grow.”
That understanding now sits at the centre of her mission. “I feel compelled to stand up for those who cannot speak for themselves, for those who feel left behind, unseen, unheard or unaccounted for,” she says. “Because they do matter.”
Lessons from home, carried into a global career
Bakwesegha-Summersby traces her drive for excellence to her father, whose unconventional advice has stayed with her. “He used to say to me, ‘If you are good at something, be the best at it, even if you are the best chicken eater,’” she recalls. “And then he would remind me that the world should remember you for that.”
That philosophy pushed her from a Communications degree at UCSI University in Malaysia toward a Master’s in Criminology and Criminal Justice at Griffith University in Australia, a decision her parents backed even when cost was a concern. When she offered to settle for a university in the United Kingdom instead, her father’s answer was immediate. “No. We will do everything we can to get you to Australia,” she remembers him saying. “And they did.”
It was in Australia that her early fascination with human behaviour deepened into the career she leads today, one that has taken her across Uganda, Malaysia, Vietnam, Indonesia, South Africa, China, Australia and India, and has included a career highlight most professionals only dream of: interviewing Archbishop Desmond Tutu.
Belonging is not enough. Support has to come too
Speaking at the World Inclusion Conference in India, Bakwesegha-Summersby noticed a word surfacing again and again in conversations among delegates from vastly different countries: belonging.
“It was fascinating to see how many people are genuinely fighting for inclusion, particularly in schools, and trying to make sure that children with disabilities have a place where they feel accepted and valued,” she says. But the conference also handed her what she calls an “aha” moment.
“We talk so much about making sure the child belongs. But what about the people who are responsible for creating that belonging? What about the teachers? The support staff? The parents?” she asks. “If the person doing the work of inclusion isn’t supported, how can we expect them to consistently create a safe and inclusive environment for somebody else?”
Her takeaway was blunt: inclusion cannot rest on the shoulders of one person, and the field has moved well past the need for more conversation. “We know what inclusion should look like. We have conferences talking about it, policies talking about it, passionate people advocating for it,” she says. “So I think the next challenge is implementation. Now we have to do it.”
Sometimes, listening is the intervention
Ask Bakwesegha-Summersby why she does this work, and she returns to the moments when a client finally feels safe enough to speak. “Nobody listens to me. I don’t feel seen. I don’t feel heard,” is a sentence she has heard more times than she can count, often from young people who have never said it to anyone else.
She recalls one client explaining a pattern of self-harm by saying she did not feel she mattered. For Bakwesegha-Summersby, the moment reframed her entire approach to the work. “You realise that you’re not simply sitting across from a person who has a behaviour that needs to be reduced,” she says. “You’re sitting across from a human being who is telling you, ‘I don’t believe I matter.’”
That conviction, that people are communicating even when their behaviour looks like defiance, withdrawal or distress, has become the throughline of her practice. “When we truly listen to someone, we’re communicating something to them: you matter, your experience matters, I’m interested in your world,” she says. “Before we can change a behaviour, sometimes we need to change the experience the person is having.”
It is a philosophy she carries from the therapy room to the international stage and back again, one built not on managing people, but on seeing them. “I’m not here simply to write a report or reduce a behaviour,” she says. “I’m here to see the person.”
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