This weeks Shake It Up hero is Peter Whatman from the ACT. Peter and his mates took the creative route in support of Shake It Up by attempting to build the worlds biggest (unofficial) house made of beer cans!

What Drives Your Commitment to find a cure for Parkinson’s?

Members of our group have family or friends who have been diagnosed with this disease and understand the stress and problems it has on the sufferers and their loved ones. This first hand experience has motivated our group to raise money and awareness for this important charity in the hope to find a cure. Also, as this is such common disease that affects many other Australian families in the same situation, we happily dedicated ourselves to this, so that we could not only help our own families, but also the many other families in the same position.

Why Shake It Up Australia?

We chose Shake It Up Australia because it was the only Australian charity that was solely dedicated to research into finding a cure for Parkinson’s.  Through new research, we believed there will be new ways developed to deal with Parkinson’s and perhaps eventually put an end to it.  We therefore decided that the Shake It Up Foundation would be the charity that would most likely achieve this goal.

Tell us what you did to Shake Things Up?

Since none of our group were great event organisers, elite athletes or world class performers we decided to use our brains and come up with an idea that would interest people, yet would also be achievable to a more ordinary person.  We, therefore, decided to build the World’s Largest Beer Can house consisting of over 10,200 can that we had tirelessly consumed ourselves.  We glued the massive structure together over a two day period at a Beer Festival and got a lot of great feedback from many people visiting, the local news and even the TV show the Project.

Greatest Challenge?

Even after weeks of careful planning and gluing together cans in my backyard we still had overcome a few challenges.  As none of us had much experience in building or engineering we encountered a few problems on the day with our adhesive, and the wind, but we were not going to be defeated by it and eventually managed to build most of the structure.  Due to time constraints and a few other problems we were not able to attach the roof, but still finished with an impressive structure and got a lot of donations and encouragement.

Greatest Reward?

The greatest reward of the day was probably the satisfaction we got in the end after 25+ hours of work over the two days, and after 3 years of planning and collecting cans and knowing not only had we achieved something quite special that no one else had ever done before, but also managed to raise money and awareness for a charity that we felt strongly about,

Best advice?

I don’t know how good my advice to anyone is but, I guess if you really want to make a difference and help, you don’t have to be super special or the best at something, you just need to be willing to try, work hard and not give up.

The guys were also featured in The Canberra Times.

To see the guys in action building the house watch this video