Welcome to PLAN Institute

As many of you already know, familyWORKs is about families helping families to find innovative ways to create or find employment for loved ones that have intellectual disabilities.  The good news is that BACI and familyWORKs have arranged for its members to be able to access the CBI Customized Employment Course online. This is a good way to learn about the best practices in creating employment for people with disabilities.

To register for the course go to Customized Employment Course. When you are on the CBI page look for the register link at the top left. Once there, please make the user name your first and last name. Use the invitation code familyworks001 then provide your email and you are good to go.

Series: Seeking Community in Chaotic Times
Speakers: Peter Block, Paul Born
Location: via conference call
Date: Tuesday, March 16, 2010, 12:00pm, Eastern

Details: Join Paul Born as he interviews Peter Block live about his latest book on community and belonging. Find out why Peter wrote the book, why he feels community is needed now more than ever and how we might work differently to change our communities for the better. Paul will also engage Peter in questions about the imperatives of our time: What is going on around us? How do we make sense of this together?

The Fourth Sector Network Concept Group, with support from the Aspen Institute and the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, have produced this Executive Summary, describing The Emerging Fourth Sector.  This is very interesting reading and runs closely parallel to the new work in Canada around Social Finance that Al Etmanski and others are working on over at socialfinance.ca.

Here is a graphic that captures this emerging sector:

This lecture is being hosted online at www.sig.uwaterloo.ca beginning Wednesday, January 27 at 7PM EST, to watch the live webcast of the Waterloo Lecture on Social Innovation featuring Adam Kahane.

An internationally acclaimed social innovator, once praised by South Africa's Nelson Mandela, Adam Kahane will deliver this year’s Waterloo Lecture on Social Innovation and will present new ideas on how to achieve significant, durable social change for pressing and increasingly complex social problems. In the lecture, Kahane will draw on his extensive experience working with business, government, and civil society leaders from around the world to help them address their toughest challenges. The lecture, entitled "Power & Love", will explore the role that these seemingly opposing forces play in affecting positive social change.

Long time PLAN champion, consultant, employee and currently web master, Brian Smith was recently awarded the prestigious 40 under 40 award by Business in Vancouver. Brian is one of those rare individuals who combines traits not often manifested together: he is passionate in his pursuit of social and economic justice; nurturing; philosophical; creative and an impeccable listener. These are skills and attributes many wish for but Brian lives and breathes. A role model for those of us who have gotten to know him through PLAN and PLAN Institute and with this award even more in our community will come to appreciate him.

Congratulations Brian!

Have a look at the attached article or here's the BIV Listing of this year's Top Forty Under 40.

We're delighted to discover in the mainstream media coverage of issues affecting people with disabilities and their families. This recent NY Times article portrays a story we have heard in many variations since PLAN and PLAN Institute were created.

Here's a excerpt which will likely resonate for many of our readers:

"In retrospect, the choice his parents made may seem like an obvious one, but it went against the prevailing wisdom of the day, and it also raised a difficult question for them: Who would support their son after they were gone?"

Supportworkercentral.com, a BC-wide website where individuals or their families can create job profiles and connect with freelance support workers in their communities, will be launched pending confirmation from our criminal record search partner myBackCheck.com that their online criminal record search process is back in service.

Dr. Lloyd Sederer has provided another interesting article in the Huffington Post - Resilience and Responsibility -- A  Commentary by Dr. Lloyd Sederer.  Belonging and its relationship to resilience is a thread weaving through the new Belonging - Living Ties website that Al Etmanski is working on.

Here's an excerpt that captures the essence of the article, "The Michael Oher story is remarkable; it also offers important insights into the limits of institutional responses to our basic need for belonging. While we need government to support social safety nets, we also need families and communities to redeem their neighborhoods and the lives in peril on every corner."

CHBC News covered the opening event of the We Are Artist exhibit at the Kelowna Art Gallery. Here is the link to the video report: http://www.chbcnews.ca/v...

Cool Arts began in the spring of 2003, when interested individuals began brainstorming about a group that would provide Fine Arts opportunities for local adults with developmental disabilities. Cool Arts vision is... to create opportunities, to make art, to take classes and learn, to be in a supportive fine arts environment, to exhibit or perform, to be part of the larger arts community.

Over the past year, 13 of the Cool Artists came together to prepare their pieces for the We Are Artists exhibit at the Kelowna Art Gallery. They have done self portraits which are part of their installment (a three piece exhibit) as well as other individual pieces. They worked together to produce several murals.

The Vancouver Sun's Don Cayo recently published an article entitled: Big Ideas: New blood, new ideas shake up old notions of philanthropy, with the tagline: The world of philanthropy has been transformed by people with money, brains and courage.

"...All this is changing the non-profit mindset, says Al Etmanski, who has changed a great deal himself in the 20 years since he co-founded Vancouver's Planned Lifetime Advocacy Network.

He has gone from business skeptic to partner and admirer, and he devotes some of his time to such unlikely nonprofit pastimes as advocating tax reform.