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Inspiring Ottawa Octogenarians: Lessons For The Future

When my dad invited me to get involved with his old-time hockey tournament it was supposed to be about raising a few dollars for LiveWorkPlay. HockeyFest (as it is now known) is into its third edition as an annual Ottawa event. It is a gathering of hockey players from local 60+ teams (including players in their 80s!). Although the players did end up donating more than $3000 (split between LiveWorkPlay and a Japan earthquake relief fund) I was surprised to find myself quite moved by the entire experience in several ways that had nothing to do with fundraising.

First off, I was shocked at how many of the players took the time to read the information about LiveWorkPlay that had been left out on a table in the lobby. My honest expectation with that is nothing at all. But this is a community of people who have great respect for each other and that means honouring the efforts of others. I was genuinely touched by the number of strangers who came up and engaged me in conversation about LiveWorkPlay with no solicitation on my part – I wanted to talk hockey!

Secondly, there is a lot to be learned from this particular community of senior citizens. I had one particular conversation (I mostly just listened) where two of the players talked with sadness about other senior citizens that live in isolation. “This is a family,” said Bob. “Yes it is,” says Mike. “I feel sorry for other seniors who don’t have a community like this in their lives. We all care about each other. The passion for hockey is what happens to bring us together.”

At an age when faith-based communities and other traditional reasons for people coming together are no longer meeting everyone’s needs, these comments certainly got me thinking about the rewards of pursuing one’s passions in life and sharing them with others.

Lastly, in some ways, being at the tournament reminded me of how time can sometimes seem to stand still. Case in point: at  a game on Friday my 71-year-old dad crashed into another player and sent him to the ice. Arriving back at the bench (after being chastised by the referee who is usually more of a token presence than an active disciplinarian) dad explained “What could I do, he ran right into me!”

I recall getting that very same explanation watching my dad play back in the 1970s when I was about 8 years old and he was knocking the innocent to the ice. That “What, who, me?” look on his face hasn’t changed a bit. A big part of “staying young on the inside” seems to be staying in touch with the joys of our youth, maybe even rediscovering hobbies and interests decades after we originally let them go.

I ended up spending most of my Friday night producing a video for the Saturday night tournament banquet. Nobody asked for that, but it seemed to me that the induction of octogenarian into an 80+ hockey hall of fame deserved to be captured and celebrated!

I hope you’ll watch the video. It’s interesting comparing the two somewhat different ways that CBC (French) and CTV Ottawa covered the event. Stories about senior citizens “being active” are certainly not uncommon, but I find that they are often very patronizing. I have a strong radar about that kind of thing because at LiveWorkPlay we are always seeking respectful portrayals of people with intellectual disabilities, but far too often the focus is pity-oriented and condescending.

We need to stop celebrating that people with disabilities or senior citizens or some other population have the audacity to live full lives. We should expect that they will – and make sure that we don’t put up barriers that make a full life difficult for them.

Everyday Heroes: Meet Your Neighbours

This blog entry was inspired by the recent release of a video created as part of an action research project by Concordia University professor Ann-Louise Davidson in collaboration with LiveWorkPlay and its members. If you are not touched by these stories, I will give you your money back!

Two stories of struggle and triumph!

Hopefully you do find the stories of these two women inspiring. I have known each of them for a decade, but watching this video myself for the first time, I gained fresh perspective and renewed admiration for their personal journeys and accomplishments. But for those of you who hear their tales of struggle and triumph and experience a similar reaction, I want to make sure it is understood that their stories are not entirely unusual in the world of individuals who have an intellectual disability.

The best explanation I’ve ever heard (from Dave Hingsburger and others) for understanding life as a person with an intellectual disability is to imagine that trying to go about your daily business is like being Rosa Parks; but instead of race-based bigotry you are constantly asked to “give up your seat on the bus” to other people who think you are incompetent, fear you, bully you, or simply don’t value you as a full citizen. This is what Hingsburger has called “disphobia” (see also disablism and ableism).

You might think an analogy that links the blunt racism confronted by Parks to the current experience of people with intellectual disabilities to be a harsh or extreme comparison. But given half of Canadians in a 2008 survey conducted by the Canadian Association for Community Living openly admitted to being uncomfortable just being around people with intellectual disabilities, it becomes easier to understand not only the disgraceful rate of unemployment (a whopping 75%) but also why the segregation of people with intellectual disabilities (see below) continues in our communities. The figures on abuse and sexual assault are shocking. You probably wouldn’t believe me, so read at your own risk these statistics from objective third parties.

We have segregated education, segregated housing, and segregated sports and recreation. This is not to say that there is never a use for specialized supports and services, but rather that we should not only invest in keeping people with intellectual disabilities apart from others, we should invest in all citizens being together. (This is sometimes known as the movement for inclusion, but that label has been significantly co-opted and corrupted, so I use it with increasing caution).

In plain language, I am talking about upstanding citizens who get treated like criminals (see slides 18 and 21 here). Their “crime” is daring to live their lives despite being labelled as “abnormal” by a society that continues to deliberately marginalize and punish the existence of “difference.”

Increasingly we do see more positive imagery associated with disability and related labels. But how often does this extend beyond disabilities that are most easily understood (or at least that people think they can easily understand) such as a person who experiences success as an author, actor, politician or business person and happens to be deaf or blind, or perhaps someone who has a complex physical disability who happens to develop a theory to explain the universe.

The truth is, I can’t help but have an appreciation for anyone who has the courage to walk the streets of Ottawa without full eyesight (yes Shelley Ann Morris, I mean you). It’s dangerous enough for pedestrians with full eyesight (I recently had to jump the hood of a car to avoid being hit while crossing with walk signal). And yes, I am in awe of someone like Stephen Hawking. But I would like you to consider that there are all sorts of other people worthy of respect and admiration – not “because they have a disability” but because they live in a world that forces existence with a disability to require courage. These are the “Rosa Parks heroes” going about their lives in our communities each and every day: people with intellectual disabilities who dare to pursue paid employment, dare to live in apartments and houses in the community, and dare to attempt and welcome friendships from the people they meet.

Featured in the video that inspired this blog are two citizens that I admire for their courage in the face of adversity – the adversity that comes from living with an intellectual disability in a society that is in many ways openly hostile to their existence – coupled with some life challenges that would test the mental and physical will of any human being.

These are just two stories of struggle and triumph. Every single person with an intellectual disability faces adversity every day. We don’t need to patronize, deify, or glamorize their existence. But we do need to challenge ourselves as a community to make the daily life of people with intellectual disabilities a bit less heroic. If you can help by supporting the creation of a job, or perhaps you’d like to consider opening your life to new possibilities, please don’t hesitate to be in touch. It’s what all of us at LiveWorkPlay are determined to make happen, but we can’t do it without your help.

Special thanks to the Canadian Association for Community Living for profiling this video on their new and exciting website, and for providing many of the statistics and references on this article.

Thanks to Agents of Good for inclusion in their Daily!

A high quality version of this video is available here (right click to download). I ask only that you notify me of how you make use of it.

Of Outputs & Outcomes: A Great Week

I spend a lot of time working on marketing and communications (what’s the difference?) with LiveWorkPlay. I believe in outcomes, not outputs, but the challenge of that perspective is outcomes are really hard! Pushing out old school press releases, or the modern version of that activity – pushing out tweets or Facebook updates – is a lot easier. You just hit send, and check off “done.” Those are outputs. They can provide for feelings of satisfaction, but it’s often a hollow victory, unless you are able to create and track actual relevant changes in behaviour (e.g. someone attends an event, applies to become a volunteer, sends a letter to their local councillor, writes a story, etc.).

We don’t have a marketing department at LiveWorkPlay. As is typical of a small grassroots charity, our HR funding comes out of what funders want, and I’ve yet to encounter a funder that is interested in supporting marketing and communications (but what a neat idea!). So, the marketing and communications work is something that I do as a part of activities with other labels – like events, education, and advocacy.

Outcomes take time, and they aren’t guaranteed. Unlike outputs, trying to achieve outcomes ensures failure some of the time. You can’t always get what you want from other people. But if you don’t try, you’ll never get what your mission says is needed (in the case of LiveWorkPlay, a good life for people with intellectual disabilities). If your goal is simply to “send things out” then you will never fail. The printer will always print you more brochures. The fax machine will always keep faxing. Tweetdeck will always keep on sending. But then again, does it really take a communications and marketing specialist to create outputs? Is that really the best use of hard-earned donor and funder dollars?

One would hope that every non-profit organization is out to help change the lives of others for the better. When we lose sight of that, we can easily become absorbed in outputs, because those can fulfil our own selfish but understandable need to feel as though we are achieving. But “spinning our wheels” is not really an achievement to be proud of, is it?

It’s easy to get impatient from investing in an outcomes-focused strategy. But solid investment in an integrated marketing and communications strategy¹ often pays off in unexpected ways, especially when you remain focused on relationships, not your pride in writing what you believe to be a well-crafted press release that vanishes into the ether.

Which brings me to the second half of my title: a great week! This was one of those weeks when the investment in relationships really paid off. I’d actually have preferred for all of these good tidings to have been spread out a little more, but it’s a happy problem when you can’t keep up with all the good news.

On Monday I found out that Spotlight on Transformation, a newsletter of the Government of Ontario, published an article I had prepared for them about social media. To me this was big news. I’ll explain.

It’s been a huge frustration of mine for years that “developmental services” (the government sector from which funding for many LiveWorkPlay supports and services is derived) does such a poor job of engaging the community in their work. Did you know there are some FIFTEEN agencies in Ottawa that serve people with developmental and intellectual disabilities – all of them BIGGER than LiveWorkPlay? Don’t worry, nobody else knows that either.

Spotlight on Transformation goes out to every developmental services agency in Ontario, so this is an opportunity to have an impact in a very targeted way. The newsletter containing my article goes straight to my ideal audience – the marketing and communications staff at all of these agencies. You might be asking “But how do you know this is resulting in a behaviour change?” Well, I know this because I’ve already received two new invites for speaking engagements on that very topic from recipients of that very newsletter.

Next up came a last-minute campaign to influence City of Ottawa staff into reversing their plans for making cuts to OC Transpo route 16. That bus route is vital to 10 people with intellectual disabilities that we are supporting to live their lives in quality affordable housing in Britannia (in condominiums that are owned by LiveWorkPlay). I was not fighting this battle alone, in fact, I was playing catch-up to the issue. I had great support from Shelley Ann Morris (hard to pin a single label on her, she’s an athlete, a disability activitist, a colleague at partner organization Volunteer Ottawa and more) and her family members, as well as chair Catherine Gardner and the vastly under-appreciated City of Ottawa Accessibility Advisory Committee.

In the end, I don’t know exactly what resulted in the decision to recommend that route 16 service on evenings and weekends be maintained, but it was a wonderfully happy outcome, and also gave two of our members the opportunity to shine in the media spotlight! We used Twitter, Facebook, email lists, submissions to the AAC, emails to councillors, and print media (see previous link). I know we had an impact because (and this is increasingly rare these days) strangers took the time to call me at the office and tell me that they were concerned about the situation and were moving to action, such as writing a supportive submission (104 in all, which appears to be second-most of any of the dozens of proposed changes).

The ball kept on rolling. It was National Volunteer Week, and although at LiveWorkPlay we believe in honouring our volunteers every day of every year, sometimes these symbolic efforts can be useful opportunities to help promote the positive. In this case, we are always willing to contribute to encouraging volunteerism, and our Volunteer Coordinator helped out with a spot on Rogers Daytime television.

Although it wasn’t published this week, I also discovered there had been an article discussing volunteerism and social media in which I was heavily quoted in Your Ottawa Region.

On Thursday I was hosting what is in many respects a very old school LiveWorkPlay charity fundraiser called Recipe for Success. There’s a certain brand of “event specialists” that can be just as annoying as “social media gurus” of the variety that try to tell you there is one right way of doing things. In the world of some event specialists, there is a life cycle for events, and you need to start over with something “fresh.” In the marketing world, we know better than that, because we ask the customer if that’s what they want. That’s why Recipe for Success goes through little tweaks each year, but it remains essentially the same after 12 years: eat some delicious food, bid on silent auction items, and have a fun-filled live auction with celebrity hosts.

This year we actually had our biggest turnout ever of Recipe for Success newcomers. A lot of them came from extended networks of our core community, the connection often being social media, especially Twitter and Facebook. We also got some last minute take-up thanks to an interview during the morning rush by co-autioneer Sandy Sharkey on 93.9 BOB FM. This year’s audience was completely charmed by Sandy and Derick Fage of Rogers Daytime TV and Mayor Jim Watson did a wonderful job of warming up the crowd, as well as some live tweeting with Councillor Scott Moffatt and MPP Yasir Naqvi getting in on the act. There was extensive coverage of the event with lots of additional information about LiveWorkPlay in the EMC Ottawa West.

Friday brought news that LiveWorkPlay will benefit from United Way Ottawa funding to help us develop employment opportunities for people with intellectual disabilities. Details are pending, but for a small charity like ours, we expect this support will enable us to double our efforts in this area of our work, which is a very good thing since the unemployment rate for people with intellectual disabilities is a staggering 75%. We’ve got that number well below 50% for the people we are supporting and with extra resources we’ll do even better.

We are also working with the United Way Ottawa and many other service providers to make our entire community a more inclusive workplace for people with disabilities. That’s a big shift from our past relationship, when LiveWorkPlay publicly challenged what we saw as confusing messaging and processes.  They’ve made a lot of changes and it feels good to have something positive to say (and that would be the case regardless of our new funding relationship).

That’s about as good as it gets in the life of a small grassroots charity in Ottawa. With revenues of less than a million and staff of less than ten, we’re a little fish swimming in a big pond with more than 3,000 charities in this region. But we are making a difference and feeling good about it. And it was one of those weeks. I sure hope there will be more of them!

¹ If you are looking for opportunities to developing your marketing skills in the non-profit and/or public sector, consider attending the MARCOM conference at the new Ottawa Convention Centre, June 11-12. If you visit the website right now, you might even see yours truly (wearing a suit no less!) as the profile image on their YouTube video.

Ottawa Bus Riders Await Their Fate

UPDATE! EVENING AND WEEKEND SERVICE FOR
ROUTE 16 IS NOW RECOMMENDED TO CONTINUE!

To everyone who wrote letters, sent emails, made phone calls, made presentations, and attended the public consultations, thank you for making your voice heard. Special thanks to the City of Ottawa Accessibility Advisory Committee for hosting a Special Meeting and providing a forum for the expression of concern for unique situations and citizens with disabilities in our community.

Click on the image to go to the full City of Ottawa report

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This is a release from Transit Commission chairwoman Diane Deans at 11:45 a.m. Wednesday morning:

Diane Deans, Chair of Transit Commission and Staff will present the OC Transpo Network Optimization Report Revised Recommendations

“We listened to our residents and significant changes have been made.”

Today, April 13, 2011 at 3:00 p.m. at City Hall, OC Transpo Staff will be providing a technical briefing of the OC Transpo Network Optimization revised recommendations.

Council approved the 2011 Budget and directed Transit Services to achieve $22 M in annualized savings. Following five city-wide consultation sessions, community meetings, e-mails, comment forms, telephone calls, petitions and staff comments, significant revisions to the initial network optimization report have been made.

Alain Mercier, General Manager of Transit Services and Pat Scrimgeour, Manager of Transit Services Design will present the revised recommendations.

It will be interesting to see how it has been possible to sort through the deluge of responses that have come in from concerned cities across the city. Below are two bus riders who are very important to me and they are speaking up about how proposed changes to Route 16 would devastate their lives.

The Problem with Having a Problem with SlutWalk

On January 24th, 2011, a representative of the Toronto Police speaking at a university campus safety session made the upsetting statement that “women should avoid dressing like sluts in order not to be victimized.”

In response, the Toronto SlutWalk was established:

“We are asking you to join us for SlutWalk, to make a unified statement about sexual assault and victims’ rights and to demand respect for all. Whether a fellow slut or simply an ally, you don’t have to wear your sexual proclivities on your sleeve, we just ask that you come. Any gender-identification, any age. Singles, couples, parents, sisters, brothers, children, friends. Come walk or roll or strut or holler or stomp with us.”

I don’t want to get into all of the details of the walk, you can read about them on the Toronto event website which also includes links to sattelite events such as the one that took place in Ottawa on April 10, simultaneous with another march in London.

Writing about this event in the Ottawa Sun, columnist Anthony Furey¹ struggles to understand what all the fuss is about:

“In taking one man’s actions and extrapolating it into a systemic problem, the protesters are guilty of exactly the same fallacy the Toronto officer conducted. They are using one instance to vilify an entire sector. All this accomplishes is creating a wedge between police and protesters.”

In case you are not getting this, Mr. Furey is suggesting that drawing attention to attitudes that blame victims of sexual assault for their choice of clothing is the wrong thing to do, because it will make the police upset.

“Those of us who know victims of sexual assault understand the last people you want to alienate are the ones tasked with protecting you. As [Chief] White said, “The reality is we want victims of crimes to report it to the police to allow us to get involved.”

I’m no expert but to me it’s impossible to avoid not knowing that the justice system is a brutal place for victims of sexual assault. The resistance of victims coming forward is not based on groundless fears. It is based on dealing with a viciously personal and invasive act of violence that must be relived, challenged, and dragged on through various stages of the investigative and judicial systems, with conviction rates that are less than encouraging.

Charges are only laid about 1/3 of the time, and if a sexual assault case does make it to court, there is only a 40% conviction rate. With my limited math skills I believe that means coming forward to report a sexual assault results in a conviction about 13% of the time. That’s not very encouraging, and on that basis alone it should be easy enough to understand why reporting rates are about as low as the rate of conviction (about 1/10 victims come forward).

Of course Chief White wants these crimes reported. But perhaps he should have been out there leading the SlutWalk, instead of encouraging Mr. Furey and those who are equally ignorant of these issues to dismiss the critical importance of communications from police officers and justice officials. Any police officer than is comfortable talking about “dressing like a slut” at a crime prevention seminar is not making a little slip. To me this is like a police officer tasked with racial relations who uses the “n-word” to describe his audience. Would a strong reaction to such an incident be inappropriate? Why is a slur against women and victims of sexual assault of lesser importance?

I personally believe that very few police officers think this way. But that number needs to be zero. We simply cannot have sexual assault victims being confronted by these attitudes. This is one of those areas where there is no room for shades of grey. It just can’t be, and we cannot continue to be mystified by low reporting rates until we are all on board that blaming the victim is 100% unacceptable.

Yes, these are the comments of one officer. But as recently as February a judge in Manitoba saw fit to described a man convicted of sexual assault as a “clumsy Don Juan” noting that the victim and her friend were dressed in tube tops, no bras, and high heels and that they were “wearing plenty of makeup.”

These incidents are not trivial. They deserve a strong response, such as that provided by the SlutWalk. Maybe it’s not a tactic that makes you comfortable. That’s a “bad word” and not everyone understands the idea of “taking it back.” Well, get over yourselves. There are more important things at stake than your sensibilities about curse words.

I wasn’t part of the walk myself, but I can’t think of my own better way to combat these dangerous attitudes (other than speaking out if I hear them or writing this blog to opposive the dismissive attitudes of a local reporter) so to all the SlutWalk organizers and participants across the country, I say keep on walking! Well done!

¹ It’s been suggested to me by friends in the blogosphere that Mr. Furey is not actually ignorant about this issue and that this column and others like it in the past are simply designed to draw attention, which draws readership, which fuels adverstising revenues. I really don’t know, so as a compromise, I don’t emphasize links to the article, I quote from it and do so in a way that I hope is fair and doesn’t lack appropriate context. The choice to read his column or not is yours, the link is here, and if you are concerned about promoting bad journalism motivated by profit, you are free to ignore it.

City of Ottawa Advisory Committees Exist for Citizen Engagement (So Use Them!)

I spent a disturbing couple of hours at City Hall in the Champlain Room on Friday afternoon. The occasion was a Special Meeting called by the Accessibility Advisory Committee (AAC).

The mandate of the Accessibility Advisory Committee is defined by the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act; briefly it is to advise Council and staff to ensure that persons with disabilities have the same level of access to municipal services and programs as do those without disabilities.

When it was determined that the city would attempt to reduce expenditures on public transit by some $20 million dollars requiring significant route changes and route eliminations, given the above mandate, would one of your first steps not be to arrange for consultation with the AAC?

I attended the Special Meeting on April 8 for “selfish” reasons. I wanted to address proposed cuts to Route 16 which would effectively strand a dozen LiveWorkPlay members (people with intellectual disabilities) who live in the Britannia area by eliminating their Monday-Saturday evening transportation and gutting Sundays altogether.

I happen to have spent about ten years of my childhood in that neighbourhood, riding what was then the 51 and is now the 16 after a long stint as the 18. The 51 was my “lifeline out of Britannia.” It’s a great neighbourhood but it’s a long way from there to just about anywhere. You can’t get out on foot without eventually climbing a steep hill up to Richmond or Carling. This is important when understanding that dots on a map don’t tell the whole story of the pedestrian experience. It’s more than 2km to Lincoln Fields Station from some parts of Britannia. That’s no simple “inconvenience” for seniors and people with disabilities.

After my presentation and some excellent questions from the ACC representatives that helped make my case to city staff (and to a Mayor Watson staff member who was in attendance as an observer) I soon forgot about the issue that had brought me there, and found myself thinking about a much bigger issue. I began to understand that this Special Meeting and the presence of a city staff member was the only input given (because none was sought) from the AAC. They were not consulted at any stage of the somewhat euphemistically titled Network Optimization process.

These are not busybodies anxious to fill seats in a meeting room. It’s a talented group of people with broad civic, business, and volunteer experience. And remember, the existence of this committee is mandated by the AODA. The majority of AAC members also have disabilities. This gives them a particular experience of our community and that expertise as individuals and as a group that cannot be rivalled by any city staff member no matter their professional training. When seeking to understand the impact of changes to city programs and services, the AAC would be a logical and wise place to begin, because they represent a segment of the population that is almost always going to be impacted most profoundly. That is certainly true when it comes to public transit.

Adding insult to injury, the city has an Accessible Transit Specialist on staff, but apparently she too was excluded from this process. The explanation offered was that her work is in “customer service” which was not part of the scope of the Network Optimization considerations. If that doesn’t give you a bit of a cold chill, you just aren’t getting it. So let me feed you one more bit of information.

Network Optimization recommendations were based on walking times (if we cancel route X, how much further will rider Y have to walk) with the “average pedestrian” in mind. There is no way to blend consideration of people who use wheelchairs into the “average pedestrian walking speed.” For some people with mental illness and/or intellectual disabilities, their situation might mean that need to live with a bus stop on their doorstep, and they will have located their homes accordingly. If the bus route changes and that bus stop is gone, the walking times are irrelevant: they’ve lost their transportation. Period. Can’t go to work. Can’t go to church. Can’t go shopping. Can’t live.

These are the types of issues the AAC could have and should have been helping with. At the Special Meeting they rhymed off with ease a number of neighbourhood hubs where there are special populations that will be grimly impacted by proposed route changes.

As the City of Ottawa website says about advisory committees “The City can benefit greatly from your expertise, enthusiasm and civic pride.” We engage volunteers on advisory committees because they have experience, skills, and expertise that can help staff and council develop more efficient and effective processes, and come up with solutions that better serve all citizens.

I can tell you without a bit of hesitation that these AAC volunteers are a strong resource that offers more than any transit specialist or consultant could possibly bring to the table when it comes to building an accessible transit system. Why was this resource wasted? Will anything be learned by their being left out of the process in 2011?

I was a part of the AAC back in the 90s when it was known as the Disability Issues Advisory Committee. I recall at the time the main complaint of those volunteers was that they did not feel that anything they were doing mattered. I sense that same frustration from the 2011 AAC.

I’m the co-leader of an organization in the non-profit sector. Any misuse of volunteer resources at LiveWorkPlay is considered one of our most serious failures. We are always ready to make changes so the volunteer experience is purposeful and enjoyable. I think the City of Ottawa needs an attitude adjustment about committee volunteers such as those who serve on the AAC. Failure to take advantage of what they have to offer is not only disrespectful, it means we as citizens and taxpayers are missing out on opportunities to be a stronger community.