News

The 2010 Paralympic Games begin officially this Friday March 12th.  Starting immediately there is a lot going on - more than enough to interest the sports fan, party enthusiast or arts connoisseur!  The combination of events will banish once and for all, any misconceptions about the talents and contributions of people with disabilities.

Don't forget Ice sledge hockey and wheelchair curling will be contested in Vancouver while the skiing events will take place at Whistler.  Here is my personal guide to make the most of what will be another fabulous two weeks in Vancouver and Whistler.

First be sure to bookmark the folks at CityCaucus.com   They had the most popular guide during the Olympics and thanks to Daniel Fontaine they intend to do the same during the Paralympic Games. Discover the most popular pavilions, where the free venues are and best bets for the sporting events, all in one place. http://citycaucus.com/pa...

Tourism Vancouver is also worth a look:  http://www.tourismvancou...

My Games begin this Tuesday March 9th  when I keynote a conference on Accessibility and Inclusion. This is a Government of Canada event and alas, it is already full.  I will summarize my presentation which is focused on the creativity of families, in a subsequent blog.

The next day, Wednesday March 10th, Shannon Bromley, Daniel Noon-Ward, Vicki Mooney and me  will each carry the torch on behalf of PLAN, RBC and our personal source of inspiration.  Come cheer us on from 10:30 - 12:30 - Riley Park Community Centre, 50 East 30th. Up to date details at www.plan.ca

On Thursday evening March 11th, I'm attending opening night of SPINE another 'tour de force' from the talented James Saunders who starred in the ground breaking Sky Dive.  It continues until March 20th. www.realwheels.ca

Friday March 12th is the Paralympic Opening Ceremonies where athletes from 45 countries will be entertained by world class talent from all over the world - there are lots of surprises planned!.  Still lots of inexpensive tickets left:  vancouver2010.com/tickets

While you are enjoying the sporting events don't forget the accompanying Cultural Olympiad and the 2010 KickstArt Festival for artists, musicians, comedians, dancers and other performers.  Two I am particularly interested in are: One,  Bill Shannon the 'CrutchMaster' who is reinventing the world of hip hop dance:  http://www.youtube.com/w...

... and two, the Exhibit: Out From Under: Disability, History and Things to Remember. The creativity and resilience of Canadians with disabilities will inspire you as much as any gold medal performance. Unleashing the extraordinary indeed.  Full program at: www.kickstart-arts.ca

The piece de resistance will be the Cultural Olympiad Gala, hosted by legendary storyteller and comedian David Roche. www.davidroche.com   It takes place on March 21st and there may still be a few tickets left.  Bill Shannon is one of the featured performers! www.vidf.ca 604- 662-4966

Oh yes don't forget the sledge hockey game March 20th.  Let's see if we can make it 3 for 3.

Hope to see you at some or all of these events.  The disability community has been working hard to 'leverage' these Games to advance the agenda for all people with disabilities.  Come see what they've created. You won't regret it.

Download Paralympic schedule.

PLAN recently published its monthly ezine for March 2010.  It revolves around leadership and advocacy for our loved ones with disabilities. Below are a couple of the lead stories, if you'd like to receive the newsletter regularly, visit PLAN.

The Quetton Family: "We realized suddenly and completely, that advocating for Theo was our job, would always be our job..."
Click here to read more>>

PLAN advocates for individuals and families both individually and through public policy changes. Greg's story highlights some of the key lessons PLAN has learned in advocating for individuals.

The Best Buddies Blues Band from LeBoldus High School in Regina will play three times in March in Vancouver and Whistler in conjunction with the Paralympics.

Please pass this information on to your PLAN and ACL members (and any others you think of), who would likely find this inclusive lively band encouraging and inspiring, as well as an awful lot of fun.

· Play at West Vancouver Secondary School – 1:30 – 2:15 Thursday March 18th

· Best Buddies Gig – 6:30 – 9:00 – we play the first 45 minutes. Friday March 19th at the Sandman Hotel in downtown Vancouver. Tickets for students and buddies are $10. Tickets for adults are $20. Doors open at 5:30 pm. Appetizers and drinks will be provided. Raffle prizes available to win. Tickets are now available from Vancouver Best Buddies Chapters.

· Play at Saskatchewan Pavilion at the golf course in Whistler – 3-4 Saturday March 20th

Here’s the contact for Western Canada:

Amy Lynn Taylor, Western Canada Program Manager
Toll Free: 778-318-3683
Fax: (416) 531-0325
info@bestbuddies.ca

Website:
http://www.rcsd.ca/lebol...

Video:
http://www.youtube.com/w...

CTV interview:
http://www.youtube.com/w...

TeleMiracle performance:
http://www.youtube.com/w...

The Family arm of the Disability Movement in British Columbia has a long and fruitful history.

Together we have: closed all institutions and segregated schools and invented numerous organizations, services and programs to enhance the safety and well being of our family members. But we have never written our history, shared, studied and learned from it. So we are launching a ‘Family Movement’ Wiki encyclopedia.

This Wiki is an opportunity: to study the deep patterns of successful social movements all over the world to write, honour and learn from the history of the family arm of the disability movement around the world and in British Columbia; and finally to chart the direction for the next stage of the family movement in British Columbia.

We encourage all students of social movements to contribute their knowledge, links, pictures etc. to this WIKI and help us revive a strong family movement. And of course we would benefit from your connections, suggestions and background on the history of the ‘family movement’ in British Columbia or wherever you live.   Better still, if you live outside BC why don't you submit an entry for the history of the family movement in your area?

The link to the Wikipedia entry is: http://en.wikipedia.org/...

Catherine Frazee is headed to the Vancouver Olympics to tell the hidden stories of disability in Canada with her art exhibit, Out From Under: Disability, History and Things to Remember.

Ironically, because of her wheelchair, VIA Rail can't accomodate her travel plans. So she'll be driving to Chicago, taking an Amtrak train to Seattle, and then driving to Vancouver.

The obstacles Frazee faces ahead of the Olympics underscores the many challenges people with disabilities face on a daily basis in Canada.

The art projects' co-creators, Kathryn Church and Melanie Panitch, will also be making the trip to the Vancouver 2010 Cultural Olympiad, though by plane. The opening on March 8 is set to coincide with the Paralympic Games. 

Besides the arduous travel, all that separates the team of curators now from the Cultural Olympiad is a wall of work -- building shipping crates, fundraising, promoting.

“We’re trying to construct a whole tour here,” Church said. “This is the first stop. But we have a piece of work we think should travel nationally. And what we’re trying to do is create that.”

“I think things are really picking up steam now, aren’t they?” mused Frazee.

Out From Under: Disability, History, and Things to Remember from NOW Magazine on Vimeo.

The exhibit was featured at the ROM in spring 2008. It is a genre-bending exploration of Canada's vast unknown past of disability successes and failures.

Or, as the Cultural Olympiad team puts it, this "luminous and elegant display of 13 diverse objects pays tribute to the resilience, creativity and cultural contributions of Canadians with disabilities.”

Traveling to Vancouver will take the exibitors out of a somewhat staid institutional context and present a compelling portrait for the world.

Not bad for a show that started out as a Ryerson University seminar in December 2006. But just like its content, Out From Under has gone from the realm of niche curiosity to profound commentary. 

“We start from these somewhat ordinary objects that are kind of embedded in various contexts that have to do with disabilities,” Church said. "We worked outward from those objects, so in a sense the growth of our understanding of the history started in the particular. And then gradually we came to understand as we worked with those objects and stories that we had grasped a history that was more general.”

In this context at least, "general" means internationally resonant.

Take the "Digging" showpiece, for example. Here Terry Poirier, an autism consultant with the ErinoakKids Central West School Support Program in Burlington, has presented a heavily worn shovel as a symbol of deplorable memories we bear and inspiring steps we are taking, to improve the lot for folks with handicaps of all sorts in this country.

An image titled "The Oppressive Shovel" supplements the object, and shows headstones of unfortunate residents at Woodlands Institution, in New Westminster, B.C., neglected in a park as fallen leaves pile up around them. Many of those institutionalized had been "forced to take very cold showers and skin-burning hot baths, and sexually assaulted, resulting in injuries and pregnancies."

The display will be all the more relevant for Olympic tourists and gallery aficionados since the work will be on display at the University of British Columbia's Robson Square. After all, by the time the photo was taken, many of the bodies had been dug up and sent to UBC to be used as cadavers.

As desperate as such revelations seem, especially considering the institution was only closed in 1996, "Digging" still manages to blaze new pathways.

"The Ceremonial Shovel" is an image depicting the sod-turning for an accessible housing development in Yellowknife, N.W.T.

"The Proud Shovel" shows a new shovel design for wheelchair-bound individuals.

It was Toronto the Good that allowed such a unique museum piece to take root, argues Frazee.

"I think social justice activism is alive and well here," she said. "Where else but in Toronto are we going to have that rich ground to seed something like Out From Under?"

"Here you have people with disabilities building the city," said church. "Toronto has enabled a coalescence."

Indeed, Out From Under is quite the "brazen insurgency of outliers taking centre, refusing periphery," as the curators describe their exhibit.

The work has not gone unheeded. This week museum studies guru Richard Sandell's book Re-Presenting Disability: Activism and Agency in the Museum will drop, including a chapter on the Out From Under exhibit.

Re-Presenting Disability: Activism and Agency in the Museum

Each step along the way the exhibit has bulked up, gaining traction in the process. Just in time to go global, they are adding an interactive element to their presentation, with the help of OISE student Margot Whitfield.

The student, currently completing a practicum in social media, is excited by the openness of Canadian youth to accessibility issues.

“I think younger people are more aware of these issues and look at it a different way," she said. “When people go to use social media they will go to use the one that’s most accessible.”

And while it appears the world is ready to hear the stories told in Out From Under, as dreadful as some are, there are still some surprising challenges ahead.

But history is alive and breathing, being churned up, rewritten to our chagrin, and reinvented with every breath we take.

While those who attend the Olympic version of Out From Under will be confronted by just how far we have yet to go to reconcile the past and conquer accessibility issues, there is a message of hope as well.

"We ask, what is your response -- what is your story in this context?" said Church. "We're using it to learn."

Copyright 2010 NOW Communications

Al Etmanski will be the keynote on the first evening of an event being organized by the Government of Canada and its partners - the province of British Columbia, 2010 Legacies Now, the Canadian Paralympic Committee, and the Active Living Alliance for Canadians with a Disability.

Al among other leading innovators will highlight advances in accessibility and inclusion in sports and recreation, tourism, transportation, housing, employment, and many other areas. The event will include an exhibit to showcase assistive technologies.

Come, be amazed by the Kickstart Festival Experience!

Kickstart is thrilled to announce Kickstart Festival 2010 - an inspiring array of exhibits, performances and workshops that will be presented to Vancouver audiences, as well as to our 2010 Winter Paralympics guests, from March 8 to 27.

Visit www.kickstart-arts.ca or email us at info@kickstart-arts.ca for more information.

"In Canada and around the world, artists and performers with disabilities are contributing to one of the most radical and effective aspects of disability culture – challenging conventional notions of beauty, form and motion."

- Catherine Frazee, Professor of Distinction, School of Disability Studies & Co-Director, Ryerson RBC Institute for Disability Studies

By Nell Edgington
http://www.socialvelocity.net/2010/01/convergence-cant-be-denied/

There is a fascinating debate going on in the blogsphere touched off by Michael Edwards, author of  Small Change: Why Business Won’t Save the World and former director of the Ford Foundation’s Governance and Civil Society program.

In essence, the debate is about whether the convergence of the private (business) and the nonprofit sectors is a good or bad thing, whether market forces help or hurt social change efforts.  Michael kicked off the debate on Monday with the first in a week-long series of posts called “Should Civil Society Be Reduced to a Subset of the Market?” In subsequent posts he went on to attack the emerging social capital market among other things.  You can read the whole series here.

Sean Stannard-Stockton, of the Tactical Philanthropy blog, took up the charge and debated many of his points.  Then the two have gone back and forth over the issues. And the debate expanded on the New Philanthropy Capital blog where Tris Lumley wrote that Michael’s argument “boils down to social capital markets vs civil society – impact measurement vs social justice, data vs values, competition vs solidarity. And in this binary view of the world, he threatens to undermine the very real progress that’s being made towards a much more balanced and realistic perspective.”  Michael responds and so does Tris.

It seems to me that fundamental to Michael’s argument is his fear about the growing convergence between the nonprofit, private and government sectors.  That somehow the “market” will sully social change efforts.  Michael argues that civil society and the market are separate entities: “Civil society operates on solidarity and commitment—the willingness to hang in there for the long haul even if results don’t go your way. Markets work on the opposite principle, “exit”: consumers are free to move from one supplier to another whenever and wherever they like. Otherwise the efficiency of resource allocation would suffer.”

But the fact is that social change efforts and the nonprofits leading them have always existed within a market economy. Resource allocation to nonprofits is very much based on a market. If nonprofits can’t convince donors or governments that their work is important or has meaning, they won’t receive resources.  Nonprofit funders are consumers who are “free to move from one supplier to another whenever and wherever they like.”  It would be great if social change efforts could exist in some sort of vacuum where their good work automatically finds resources, but the world doesn’t work like that.  And as resources for social change efforts become increasingly competitive, nonprofits, and for profits working towards social change, have to become smarter about responding to the marketplace. And as the marketplace demands more social change efforts, which is increasingly the case, more resources will be brought to bear on those social change efforts, thus the creation of the social capital market.

The growing convergence among the public, private and nonprofit sectors is a reality we can’t avoid.  Nonprofits have to respond more effectively to market forces, governments have to be more efficient in their allocation and use of resources, and businesses, in order to survive in a marketplace that increasingly values social good, have to understand and respond to the effects their products and services and business model have on the broader society.

Binary systems and separated sectors just don’t exist anymore.  The lines are blurring.  The market is part of the reality of social change efforts.  To deny that is silly.

................................................................
Another contribution on the topic from Lucy Bernholz...see attached "Changing The Ecosystem of Change"

To share successful practices and facilitate networking across sectors, the Public Policy Forum, in collaboration with Social Innovation Generation (SiG), organized a national dialogue on social innovation with support from Human Resources and Skills Development Canada (HRSDC), Imagine Canada, and MaRS.

Accelerating Social Innovation: Smart Ideas for Canada - Part One from MaRS Discovery District on Vimeo.

Entitled Accelerating Social Innovation: Smart Ideas for Canada, the multi-sector conference served as a timely platform to explore ways to build on existing innovations and develop new approaches to improve the way we support and work with each other in the 21st century. The conference report highlights successful innovations, captures key recommendations for supporting innovation in Canada, and presents areas for further exploration.

The Conference Report from Accelerating Social Innovation: Smart Ideas for Canada is now available for download by clicking here.

Here is a presentation by Al Etmanski on the multi-sector conversation about social innovation and how it can change the way we support and interact with each other in the 21st century.

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.

The course is in 6 modules and you can learn at your own pace. The online course will only be available until March 31st so try and complete the six modules before then. If you need any assistance please give me a call at 778.227.0161 or drop me a note at lusignan1@shaw.ca

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?

Peter Block: Community The Structure of BelongingPeter writes, "Modern society is characterized by isolation and a weakened social fabric. The various sectors of our communities - businesses, schools, social service organizations, churches, government-work in parallel, not in concert. They exist in their own worlds as do so many individual citizens, who long for connection but end up marginalized, their gifts overlooked, their potential contributions lost. This disconnection and detachment makes it hard if not impossible to envision a common future and work towards it together."

Peter Block is the author of several best selling books. Many of us know Stewardship: Choosing Service Over Self-Interest (1993) and the wildly successful Flawless Consulting (2000). His books are about ways to create workplaces and communities that work for all. They offer an alternative to the patriarchal beliefs that dominate our culture. His work is to bring change into the world through consent and connectedness rather than through mandate and force.

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.

What: Waterloo Lecture on Social Innovation featuring Adam Kahane

Date: Wednesday, January 27, 2010

Time: 7pm - 9pm EST

Free Live Webcast: The Waterloo Lecture on Social Innovation will be webcast live free of charge on www.sig.uwaterloo.ca beginning January 27 at 7pm EST.

For more information on the live webcast or if you are interested in attending the Waterloo Lecture on Social Innovation in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, please email siglecture@uwaterloo.ca

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?"

COMMITMENT George Kramer, 71, at Kramer's Hardware in Flatbush, where he knows everything about everything, including the keys.

The Family Support Institute is pleased to announce the launch of its new initiative, Support Worker Central, an online database designed to match individuals, families and agencies with support workers in their communities. The website is www.supportworkercentral.com.

Over the past few years many people have expressed a desire for a central website where individuals and families and from all over British Columbia could connect with qualified support workers in their communities for personal support needs and community participation.

Support Worker Central is a one-year pilot project aimed at testing the effectiveness of a centralized BC-wide website. On Support Worker Central, families and individuals post jobs, entering specific criteria that will be matched against support workers who have set up profiles on the site.

Agencies offering support worker services can advertise their services on Support Worker Central, as well as post jobs to recruit potential support workers.

The success of the website is dependent upon getting the word out to families and potential support workers and you can help us do that by sharing this exciting news with others and by displaying the attached poster.

The Family Support Institute is a province-wide organization whose purpose is to strengthen and support families faced with the extraordinary circumstances that come with having a family member who has a disability. We believe that families are the best resource available to support one another. Directed by families, the Family Support Institute provides information, training and province-wide networking to assist families and their communities to build upon and share their strengths.

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."

I particularly appreciate this following paragraph,"As important a question as is "why do some youth go bad" is "why others, from the same circumstances and horror, find a way to make a life, to respond to hands that reach out to them?" Resilience is what separates the survivors from the casualties. Physics tells us that resilience is a property, the capacity of some material to absorb energy and respond elastically so as to retain its integrity and not become deformed by the impact of the energy. The emotional equivalent is a person's ability to absorb stress and not be broken by it. Michael Oher had resilience, and so do many more in Hurt Villages across this country and world. But resilience must be nurtured. After awhile, the material, human or otherwise, bends and breaks from the forces impacting it. People, not institutions, are what foster resilience. This is why individuals, families and communities, for their neighbors and those across the tracks, need to wonder "what can I do?"

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 Cool Arts Board of Directors, spearheaded Sara Lige, a board member and parent, worked in conjunction with the Kelowna Art Gallery to facilitate this exhibit. They collaborated with other community groups to produced a beautiful catalogue featuring each of the artists work, their bio as well and their thoughts on their work with Cool Arts. This catalogue also provides terminology common to the arts community as well as the disability community serving as a great teaching tool. Copies of these catalogues will be sent to Art Galleries throughout Canada to bring awareness and to promote similar artist groups throughout the country.

Opening night saw a huge crowd, over 225 people attended including the Mayor of Kelowna. The art gallery staff were amazed at the turn out, noting that a good opening night may see 80 attendees. The show runs until March 21, 2010. This is a must see if you are in the Kelowna area.

For more information or to stroll through the Cool Art gallery go to www.coolarts.ca .

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.

The drying up of government grants is forcing non-profits to return to their roots as creative fundraisers, Etmanski said.

But "it's not enough to find more creative ways to send the ambulance down the street. We need to figure out what's causing the injuries.

"That's the work, upstream and I'm finally seeing a whole lot more attention to that."

"How do you bring it to scale so it gets in the water supply?"

“PLAN is now 20. If we have been successful, it is because we have been nurtured by a loving community that has cradled us, cared for us and stood by us.

Our journey has taught us that friends are our loved ones most important asset. We’ve also learned that to PLAN, you, our friends, are our most important asset. You could say, in fact, that we have benefited from being at the centre of a network ourselves.

I’d like to pay special thanks to Vancity. Not only has Vancity sponsored this evening but our relationship dates back to our earliest days. Our relationship with Vancity has been essential to our vitality and success.

I hope that you will savour all of the music and song, the words of wisdom, the beauty and light, the smells and tastes of the evening. Most of all I hope that you will enjoy the love of friendship and belonging that surrounds us.” – Rob Bromley, Chair

A slideshow of pictures from the evening is available in PLAN's Photo Gallery.  Here's a couple of my favorites:

Participate in an interactive, online discussion highlighting the social finance landscape in Canada hosted on socialfinance.ca

Al Etmanski will be one of the key contributors to this important conversation.  Starting things off, he posts:

"I am interested in social finance because it levers existing and new funds to improve society's ability to tackle social, economic and environmental challenges. Social finance is a creative response to the dominant challenge of the social sector - access to capital - a challenge that will only get worse. Social finance is the financial architecture emerging in Canada and elsewhere to service the financial requirements of social enterprises, social purpose businesses, entrepreneurial non profits; and their granters, investors and lenders. This involves providers of capital as well as intermediary organizations who broker funds; manage risk; measure impact and results; create financial products, services and new pools of capital designed with our financial and mission interests."

SFU's Centre for Education Research and Policy recently released a report that verifies inclusion policies in schools are working. Here is the preface of the report:

9th December 2009: In British Columbia, students with special educational needs typically learn in the same classrooms as other students. This inclusion policy may sometimes arouse concern that other students could see their education negatively affected.

Download the Resarch Briefing for more information.

In a new study, the Centre for Education Research and Policy at Simon Fraser University compared the achievement of successive cohorts of students within every public elementary school (as measured by the change in individual Foundation Skills Assessment scores between grades 4 and 7), for cohorts entering grade 7 between 2002 and 2004. CERP’s researchers then measured the effect of having more or fewer classmates with disabilities.

The results show that increasing the proportion of students with special educational needs has only extremely small and statistically insignificant effects on the achievement of other students.

“This research provides credible evidence that, whatever B.C.’s teachers are doing to support students with disabilities and their classmates, it is successful in ensuring that there are no detrimental side-effects of the inclusion policy”, said co-author Dr. Brian Krauth.

Please take a quick look at this new L'Arche website celebrating the International Day of Persons with Disabilities.  And, this lovely introductory video:

I AM... I Love from L'Arche Canada-Communications on Vimeo.

Lloyd I. Sederer, MD, Medical Director, New York State Office of Mental Health, recently published an article reflecting on the social enterpreneurs, such as Al Etmanski, he met while on a trip to Bellagio, Italy to explore belonging, inclusion and homelessness.  Here's how he begins:

Last week I took a few days of leave from my job to join a group gathered with the support of the Rockefeller Foundation to problem solve on how to bring marginalized people into mainstream lives of value to them and their communities... - including those with physical disabilities, mental retardation, mental illness, immigrants, migrant workers, the elderly and the extremely poor. The conference group was a small international collection, from India, South Africa, Poland, Mexico, Australia, Belgium, the United Kingdom, Canada and the USA. But what defined the group was that they were principally social entrepreneurs. What is a social entrepreneur?

The full article is at The Huffington Post.

 Equal Futures named Helena Cant and Vickie Cammack as its first two recipients of their Inspirational Leader Award.   Congratulations to both!

L'Arche Canada recently released the Winter Edition of A Human Future whihc features an interview with Ian Brown.

This fall, Random House published Ian Brown’s very beautiful, and to some, controversial, book The Boy in the Moon, about his journey with his son Walker, who is profoundly disabled by cardiofaciocutaneous syndrome (CFC), a rare genetic disorder.

Follow this link for current and back issues of A Human Future.

Authored/Prepared by: Beth Porter

Published by: L'Arche Canada

Date published: December 2009

Publication Type: Interview

Description: Walker Brown: Pool of Hope; Collective Work of Art; Teacher

The program offers profiles of courageous individuals and families who have awakened their faith communities to the contributions of people with special needs.

SEEKING YOUR HELP

ABC offers this program to its affiliates across the country as part of a series called Vision and Values, with a potential audience of 40 million viewers. Each station manager chooses whether and when to air it and at what time. In many places, this program will air at noon or 1:30 in the afternoon. However, in some major markets the times are completely inaccessible, such as 4:30 a.m. in Philadelphia. How much consciousness-raising is going to happen at that hour?

ACTION STEPS

If enough viewers call their station managers and express a strong interest in this program and ask for a more appropriate airtime, additional or better-timed screenings can be scheduled for up to two months, between December 6th and February 6th. Please help us by doing the following:

1. Call your own station manager (see a complete list of local affiliates).

2. Post this announcement on any appropriate listserv you have access to, such as: your congregation; a parents' group you belong to; schools or advocacy groups focused on disability and inclusion.

Tyze has launched its new homepage and it looks and works great. Viewers can access useful resources such as:

Video, including an explanation of how Tyze helps to bridge formal and informal systems of care.

Audio, including a new podcast entitled: Better Together Podcast Episode 02 - John McKnight and Peter Block on Belonging and Community.

Tips for engaging your network members.

Stories, such as this one: A Tyze Story in the good times, the difficult times and the sad times.

News, research and more.

We are again reminded that "When we contribute we belong."

For its first Paralympic Torchbearer, RBC selected Al Etmanski, an author and co-founder of Planned Lifetime Advocacy Network (PLAN), which was instrumental in advocating for the new Registered Disability Savings Plan and assists families across Canada and globally in addressing the financial and social well-being of relatives with a disability.

Graham MacLachlan, regional president, RBC, British Columbia, said: "Al Etmanski has long demonstrated his commitment to helping people with disabilities and their families succeed through his work as an advocate and social entrepreneur. RBC is proud to select him as our first Paralympic Torchbearer on this historic relay."

By Peter A. Hall and Michèle Lamont
From Monday's Globe and Mail
Harvard academics Peter A. Hall and Michèle Lamont share their insights into what makes societies successful

Why are some societies more successful than others at promoting individual lives and the collective development of the community? Social scientists rarely ask this obvious question, partly because we fear imposing our values in our answers and partly because it is so complicated to answer. With the support of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, however, a diverse group of social scientists has been considering it, and here is what we've found.

A wide range of outcomes can be associated with successful societies, including open access to education, civic participation, cultural tolerance and social inclusion. However, we chose to measure societal success by elemental health indicators such as life expectancy - a goal most human beings agree is valuable.

Health outcomes pose many sets of puzzles for social scientists. Consider two examples. When the Communist regimes of Eastern Europe fell after 1989 - in a set of developments some described as the "end of history" - one might have expected daily life to improve for those people who had been given new freedoms and, for some, it did. After dipping during the transition, male life expectancy in the Czech Republic, for instance, began to improve rapidly under the new regime, reaching 72 years by 2001. Male life expectancy in Russia, however, dropped sharply during the transition and remained so low that it was barely 59 years in 2001. Why did a historic development improve collective well-being in one nation and erode it in another?

These gaps translate into millions of years of productive life. Why are they occurring?

Recent movements in life expectancy in the United States and Canada are equally puzzling. In the two decades after the Second World War, Canadians and Americans gained years of life at about the same pace. Since the 1970s, however, U.S. life expectancy has been increasing more slowly than in Canada. The average Canadian now lives two years longer than an American. And although women live longer than men, they are losing their relative advantage at a faster pace in the U.S. than in Canada. These gaps translate into millions of years of productive life. Why are they occurring?

In all countries, people of lower socioeconomic status tend to have worse health than those in higher socioeconomic positions - a phenomenon so pervasive that some describe social inequality as the "fundamental cause" behind disparities in population health. We think the origins of this "health gradient" lie in the "wear and tear of daily life." Many studies show that the emotional and physiological responses generated by the challenges people encounter in daily life condition their susceptibility to many of the chronic illnesses that have become the dominant causes of mortality in the developed world. The poor fare worst not only because they face more challenges but because they have fewer "buffers" to protect them from this wear and tear.

While some of these buffers are tied to personality and behavioural inclinations rooted in early childhood development, many others are not personal but social in character, and we examine them in a recent book, Successful Societies: How Institutional Culture and Institutions Affect Health. We argue that societies that recognize a wide range of people as full members of the community deserving of recognition and support, for instance, provide more extensive buffers than societies that stigmatize those who are different. This is also true of societies where ethnic boundaries are not strongly policed (e.g. Canada versus the U.S.) and interracial relationships not stigmatized (e.g. Brazil versus the U.S.).

Buffering societies are also ones that empower people by providing them collective narratives of empowerment and shared hope, as Barack Obama did right after the last U.S. election. They give people in all walks of life the tools they need to imagine "possible selves" that offer them routes to a more positive future. Images such as these help people resist negative messages and buffer them against the daily injuries of class and race - against the wear and tear of inequality that gets under the skin to sustain poor health, including unhealthy behaviours.

There are lessons in this for policy-makers concerned about health. Ann Swidler's chapter for Successful Societies compares AIDS prevention programs in Botswana and Uganda. Although Botswana is widely seen as better-governed, these programs have been much more successful in Uganda. Why? In Uganda, prevention campaigns were able to tap into the social imagery of the local community, invoking the obligations ordinary people feel to friends and neighbours. They were designed to resonate with the way people understand their lives. Many kinds of policies will be more effective when they are designed to build on concepts of community and shared values specific to local or national context.

Important though it is, the current U.S. debate about health care misses most of these points. Universal access to health care is crucial. But the health of a society will ultimately depend on quality of life, and quality of life has to do not only with social policy and income distribution, but also with how we treat one another, how sharply we draw the line between "us" and "them," and what the experience of daily living feels like. In this respect, the secret of successful societies is not only in the hands of our governments and health reformers, but also in the choices we all make about how we deal with one another.

Peter A. Hall is a professor of European studies and government at Harvard; Michèle Lamont is a professor of European studies and sociology at Harvard. The authors are co-editors of Successful Societies: How Institutions and Culture Affect Health.