News

L'Arche Canada is proud to launch its Grief Support Group Kit for people with intellectual disabilities. The Kit consists of 3 documents--a Manuel for Facilitators, A Journal for participants, and a Background document that describes the beginnings of this work in L'Arche Toronto. The documents were written by Jane Powell.

Click here to access the kit

A national dialogue on aging for people with an intellectual disability

April 18-20, 2013, Winnipeg, Manitoba

Ann Pavilonis will present on the "Healthy Aging" panel. Jane Powell will speak on the panel on "Grief, Loss and End of Life." Jane will be presenting L'Arche Canada's new bilingual online kit for conducting Grief Support Groups for People with Intellectual Disabilities. The Kit is available free of charge on L’Arche Canada’s here on its Aging and Disability website.

All who are interested in quality end-of-life care issues are invited to make submissions to the Parliamentary Committee on Palliative and Compassionate Care. Submissions will assist the Committee in preparing its next Report which will focus on disability rights.

All who are interested in quality end-of-life care issues are invited to make submissions to the Parliamentary Committee on Palliative and Compassionate Care.  Submissions will assist the Committee in preparing its next Report which will focus on disability rights.

(To view the Committee's first Report, click on the cover page to the left.)

George Paul Dienesch, Committee Assistant to the Parliamentary Committee on Palliative and Compassionate Care (PCPCC) indicates that his Committee is planning to write a report focusing on disability rights. He is seeking information from the disability community and is inviting people to make e-mail submissions telling the stories of people with disabilities, conveying their hopes, dreams, and needs, illustrating how they are becoming more fully a part of their communities and of civil society in Canada, and highlighting, in particular, the things that are being done to ensure good end-of-life support when needed.

Mr. Dienesch requests that “…people … address their stories and quotes to the Parliamentary Committee on Palliative and Compassionate Care, date them, give [the Committee] their name or organization, a town, city Province etc.; …[the Committee] can then consider these official e-mail submissions and integrate them into their report.”

Mr. Dienesch is seeking to have his draft report ready for the Committee for February.

Email submissions can be sent directly to Mr. Dienesch at gdienesch@yahoo.ca

To view the Committee's first report, entitled "Not to be Forgotten: Care of Vulnerable Canadians", click here.

Friday, April 1, 2011 - 09:00 - 15:30

Join Dr. David Sherbino (MPS STM DMin CSDS FT) and Dr. Jonathan Sherbino (MD MEd FRCPC FAcadMEd) in a day of talking through the pastoral and spiritual issues that surround the death and dying of our loved ones, including the grieving process, ethical and legal issues concerning death and dying, coming to terms with one’s mortality, and saying good-bye.

This event is sponsored by the Tyndale Association of Spiritual Directors.

Location:

Van Norman Worship & Study Centre,
Tyndale University College & Seminary
25 Ballyconnor Ct., Toronto

For more information or to register on-line go to www.tyndale.ca/go/a-good-death

Merci,

On January 24th, Vision TV presents  :

A Fearful Joy - "Growing old gracefully".  

 Jean Vanier discusses old age, the nearness of death, the advantages of a slow death surrounded by people we know helping them cope with the reality of one's passing. A discussion about being 80 and the way old age is viewed by our culture. His own disengagement from his work related responsibilities, the pleasures of aging as consuming desires are set aside. Also the danger of concluding that the world is much worse than it was when one was young, of becoming a carping critic.

Also on Vision TV from January 24 - 28

• Jean Vanier at 80 - "Being 80: What Took You So Long?" / Jan 24 at 11pm ET

• Trust - "Why God is in disrepute" / Jan 25 at 11pm ET

• What Is Sacred - "Why religion will survive” / Jan 25 at 11:30pm ET

• Inwardness - ”The need to love” / Jan 26 at 11pm ET

• A Journey To Meaning - "How to gain from loss" / Jan 26 at 11:30pm ET

• Grief As A Process - "The epiphany of despair, the journey to meaning" / Jan 28 at 11pm PT

• Jean Vanier in Conversation - The Need for Self Acceptance / Jan 28 at 11:30pm

VisionTV is a multi-faith and multi-cultural network that promotes understanding among and tolerance between people of different faiths and cultures. Broadcast into over 7.8 million Canadian households, VisionTV has extensive carriage with all major distributors. 

Presentation to the Parliamentary Committee on Palliative and Compassionate Care made by Jean Vanier, social visionary, humanitarian and founder of the international movement of L’Arche communities.

Let us look for ways, in the care of our vulnerable populations, that we can welcome, honour and celebrate weakness, theirs and our own. Let us give our most vulnerable members a central place in our hospitals, care plans, old peoples’ homes, nursing homes, psychiatric facilities, and in our own homes. Let us acknowledge that this task is profoundly counter cultural in a society based on competition and the need to win, so let us be prepared for the struggle this implies, individually and as a society. Let our professionalism also model openness to and welcome of vulnerability, in ourselves and others. In this way we will humanize our services and ourselves, and our communities will be enriched.

Care of vulnerable people

Thank you for the opportunity to reflect with you on the care of vulnerable people.
Your committee has a most important task, for it is said that we will be judged as a society by how we treat our most vulnerable members. It is wise to listen to, and learn from them, even as we serve them.

For the past 46 years I have lived with people intellectual disabilities. I have listened to them and learned from them. These beautiful men and women have much to teach us about vulnerability, about caring, and about the ways of the heart. As individuals and as a population, they have a lived history of suffering, of being rejected and hidden away; away from the mainstream, away from power, away from belonging. Their obvious physical impairments, their openness of heart and their cry of need for relationship have gently invited me to reflect on my own impairments, fear of openness and need for relationship. They have been my teachers in the school of the wise and tender heart.

What I have learned from them, in their humility and their humiliations, is that we are all vulnerable people. Each one of us is important, especially the weakest among us. In our vulnerability we are easily hurt¸ and we have elaborate systems of self protection which keep us from being open with each other. We need each other, and yet we are deeply afraid of this need. Our fear estranges us from our own weakness, and keeps us from exercising the fullness of our humanity in caring for each other, individually and as a society.

I have just celebrated my 82nd birthday. As well as a sense of deep gratitude for my life, there are losses. Over the past two years I have significantly curtailed my long distance travel. I grow tired more easily, and need to nap with regularity. However I experience great joy as those whom I have welcomed over the years, now care for me. They have spared me for the last decade from doing the dishes! More recently theyobserve my physical fatigue, patting me on the head with great tenderness saying: "Poor old man". My vulnerability is cherished by them, as theirs has been by me, and this helps me to welcome mine in its newest incarnation, old age with its joys but also with its various indignities.

Each of us is fragile, with deep needs for both love and a sense of belonging. We begin and end our lives vulnerable and dependent, requiring others to care for us. Throughout our lives there are other moments of fragility and dependence. In our states of dependence, our need cries out for attention and care. If this need is well received, it calls forth the powers of love in others, and creates unity around us, the gifts of the vulnerable to our world. If our cry and our need are unmet, we remain alone and in anguish.

The vulnerable people whom your committee is called to reflect about caring for, are often in a precarious state, mentally or physically or both. They are often in anguish. The old, those living with illness and perhaps near death, those in depression and with a sense of despair, those living with disabilities; these are all people living in a most fragile state. The danger in our culture of productivity and achievement is that we easily dismiss and ignore as unproductive the gifts and the beauty of our most vulnerable members, and we do so at our own peril, dehumanizing ourselves.

In 1973 in our little community we welcomed Janine, then age 40. Janine was physically very fragile; she had epilepsy, she was hemiplegic, she was fat, and she had diabetes. Janine was furious! She came to us having suffered forty years of humiliation; she had never been to school, she had been hidden away from others 24/7, and had lived a constant betrayal of her personhood. She would scream and scream, her screaming saying to us: "Won't anyone ever see me as person? A person with needs and desires, hopes and dreams?" What Janine needed from us was of course that her physical needs be competently attended to. Beyond that however what she most desperately needed from us was for people to get to know her, to respect her, and to reveal to her, beyond her obvious disability, her beauty as a human being.

This revelation occurred gradually, not through therapy, but through sustained and loving friendships, wherein Janine could find her place, and be lifted out of her prison of loneliness and despair. Gradually Janine blossomed. Equally important, we were transformed by her need for us. In her cry we recognized our own anguish, and our own need for recognition and love. We also recognized, faced with our individual limitations and her overwhelming needs, the necessity of our being united in caring for her.

If this need is well received, it calls forth the powers of love in others, and creates unity around us, the gifts of the vulnerable to our world. If our cry and our need are unmet, we remain alone and in anguish.

Of course we must also be competent professionals, clear about our skills and limits and willing to consult widely about those we serve. However, there is grave danger here that our competence becomes the goal, serving excellence rather than people. When faced with the vulnerability or anguish of another, the forces of anguish within us can be awakened. Without proper support, we quickly protect our own vulnerable humanity. We have many wonderful and creative ways to do this, as many ways as there are people. We may use the compulsion to work to meet the unending need for service, putting the accomplishment of the work above the person cared for. We of course need to be clear about our boundaries. However, citing the need for maintaining professional boundaries, we can eternally hide ourselves behind professional distance, losing the necessary mutuality that is both the soil and fruit of humane service.

A doctor told me of visiting a colleague in a hospital. The patient was herself a doctor and most importantly a young mother. She had been acutely ill, was in the intensive care unit for 14 days, and had almost died. She was then transferred to the general ward, where she was terrified that she would die, leaving her young children motherless. For 2 weeks someone had been at her side every minute, but now a nurse came by intermittently, taking her blood pressure and pulse only every few hours instead of continuously. The patient had young children and became terrified that she would die, leaving them without a mother. When her friend and colleague visited her, she sat on the bed, took the patient's hand in hers and gently asked "How are you?" "This is the first time someone has touched me in a nonmedical and humane way since I arrived in the hospital 3 weeks ago". Some of the ways we must interact with vulnerable people, listening for their fears, touching them with tenderness, are not very complicated, though obviously others are much more so.

What then is it we need to provide for those whom we ask to care for vulnerable populations? What training and support do they require? Firstly, we need to cultivate a culture of care where the importance of each person, care givers and recipients, is the primary value. Their histories, medical and personal, are important here, as the relationship begins. We need to know a little bit about the people we are treating; who they are, what are their likes and dislikes, their hopes and dreams. The wellbeing of each individual should be upheld, over efficiency, scheduling, meetings or even standards of excellence, and to do so requires a shift in focus from the job-to-be-done to the-wellbeing-of-the-person-served. The needs of the most fragile individual should be given priority, and this in itself will foster unity and transformation.

I am reminded of the young woman who took a job as a personal care worker in an old people's home. There one of her clients was an elderly woman who was alone in the world, dishevelled, without visitors or friends. She appeared unremarkable and was easy to forget. Her food was often served and eaten cold, as nobody thought to offer it to her while still warm. In many ways the old woman seemed invisible. Then one day the younger care worker noticed her and struck up a conversation. The following day the same interaction, and gradually the young worker found herself in a friendship with the elderly woman. Most importantly, the younger woman found herself transformed by this friendship with the old woman. Not only did the old lady look forward to the visits of the younger woman, but the latter began to find new meaning in her job and new happiness in her perception of herself. The relationship with the older woman revealed to the younger a part of herself she had not previously welcomed.

We need to encourage caregivers to enter into appropriate but real relationships with those they serve, relationships which both validate the client and transform the caregiver.

We need to encourage caregivers to enter into appropriate but real relationships with those they serve, relationships which both validate the client and transform the caregiver. We must help carers to recognize and welcome their own weakness. We need to create places of safety where caregivers can share with each other the anguish which rises up within from time to time, evoked by a client's anguish. They need also to be able to share together their feelings of helplessness, inability, anger, frustration, violence and grief. These feelings are within each of us, and sharing them constructively as a group will encourage growth towards unity and maturity in the individual and within the group, and will help to prevent burnout.

Once I was invited to talk to military officers in training, and not sure how exactly I could advise them, I showed them a short movie about l'Arche, the community where I live. The movie talked about welcoming our own weaknesses, and the beauty of human frailty. Afterwards I ate lunch with the generals who had invited me to speak, and I felt a little embarrassed by the content of my talk. "Do not apologize", said the senior General. "Why do soldiers torture their prisoners? It happens when they have not understood their own limits or welcomed their own weakness."

Let us look for ways, in the care of our vulnerable populations, that we can welcome, honour and celebrate weakness, theirs and our own. Let us give our most vulnerable members a central place in our hospitals, care plans, old peoples' homes, nursing homes, psychiatric facilities, and in our own homes.

Let us acknowledge that this task is profoundly counter cultural in a society based on competition and the need to win, so let us be prepared for the struggle this implies, individually and as a society. Let our professionalism also model openness to and welcome of vulnerability, in ourselves and others. In this way we will humanize our services and ourselves, and our communities will be enriched.

Thank you.

Jean Vanier

The GOWD (Growing Old with a Disabilitiy)  conference will be an action oriented program, in that all presenters will be asked to consider one of seven major topical themes that affect the lives of persons growing older with a disability and give it context.

There is also an eighth theme for cross-cutting theoretical and policy presentations that span one or more of the conference topical areas. A statement of this conference structure is being developed.

The following themes delineate the focus of this conference:

• Age-Friendly Liveable Communities
• Health Promotion and Wellness
• Health Equity and the Elimination of Health Disparities
• Health Literacy, Health Communication and Health IT
• Long-Term Care and Community-based Services and Supports
• Social Engagement and Participation
• Employment, Economic Security and Retirement
• Cross-Cutting Theoretical and Policy Issues

Festival dates: June 5 – 8, 2011

Contact us at info@ficcdat.ca

Early bird registration deadline: April 1, 2011

Delegate registration deadline to be included in the program: April 22, 2011

Conference Rates

• Early bird $750
• Regular $900

Consumer, Student*, Unpaid Caregiver Rates

• Early bird $375
• Regular $450

Learn  more at  : www.ficcdat.ca/

October 21th, 2010 RSA 15th Annual Conference  Aging ... The Gift of Time : Using it Wisely

Thursday, October 21, 2010 and Friday, October 22, 2010
Four Points Sheraton, London, Ontario

COST: $175.00 for both days

EARLY BIRD: $155.00 if payment is received prior to September 30, 2010

Includes lunch and refreshments for both days

For registration information please contact

Karen Araujo at (519) 433-7238 Ext. 2226

or

Jayne Joyes at (519) 433-7238 Ext. 2212

or via email to

karaujo@wgh.on.ca

jjoyes@wgh.on.ca


SPACES ARE LIMITED SO REGISTER EARLY TO AVOID DISAPPOINTMENT!

October 5-8, 2010, Montreal, Palais des congrès

A unique opportunity to meet, share experiences and exchange ideas with colleagues from 50 countries, representing all disciplines - nurses, physicians, social workers, physical and occupational therapists, music therapists, pharmacists, pastoral care persons, administrators, volunteers, psychologists.

Practical, in-depth workshops and seminars on a broad range of topics covering all aspects of end-of-life care, from the most current scientific developments in pain and symptom control to the large existential questions, to hands-on experiential sessions addressing practical issues faced every day.

Click here to learn more ...

May 14, 2010

Algonquin College – Ottawa, Ontario

There is a growing, international movement which supports the development of “age friendly communities”. One of the compelling features of this movement is that it emphasizes the principle that healthy, age friendly communities are also inclusive communities. All means all!

Older adults who have intellectual disabilities challenge communities to think and act “outside the boxes” created by the way in which we organize services.

As a follow up to our extremely exciting 2006 conference Champlain Regional OPADD Committee in partnership with Algonquin College has created this 2010 symposium to bring together professionals and people involved with/interested in building age friendly communities which include individuals with intellectual disabilities.

Activities will include:

· An orientation to the “age friendly communities” approach through our Key note Speaker Leah Sadler, the Associate Director of Education, Murray Alzheimer Research and Education Program, University of Waterloo. Over the past two years, Leah has worked on many research and education projects that involve a number of community partners including person living with dementia, family partners in care and professionals working with older adults.

· Poster sessions of resources will be available to highlight best practices

10 mini-workshops which enable sharing of interesting ideas for supporting the inclusion of older adults with intellectual disabilities which will include topics on Education, resources, Collaboration Partners in Client care, tools such as U First and Pieces training, Best Practices in Inclusion, Seniors mentoring, and more.

· Our afternoon will be several Conversation cafés/dialogue – quick moving and interactive aimed at bringing the best ideas and partnerships from our community partners and participants with an outcome aimed at community building and bridging the gaps which inhibit (inclusive) age friendly communities.

Our partnership with Leadership Ottawa and the Sanitas Playback Theatre will make this an exciting day from beginning to end.

If you think that the inclusion of Seniors with Developmental Disabilities in to our Communities is important and you want to be part of building an Ottawa and Region Community which is age friendly and inclusive, this is the event to not miss!

Registration is through the school of Part Time Studies at Algonquin College

We look forward to your active participation in this event

Yours

Symposium Co-Chair Michael Coxon OPADD Champlain Regional Chair Symposium Co-Chair Kristen Hayes DSW Program Algonquin College

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