Community Connections Support Services' Home on the Web
Today we’re celebrating International Women’s Day! The theme this year is #BreakTheBias — check out videos submitted by the global community about celebrating women’s achievements, raising awareness against bias, and taking action for equality (or make and submit your own!).
Do you use social media? Consider posting using a selfie card to encourage others to commit to taking action – check them out here.
Hey everyone, Kelowna Museums is hosting Women of the Okanagan — a virtual celebration of women. Tickets include interactive packs, fun props and coupons for local businesses, and additional proceeds are in support of the Kelowna Women’s Shelter. If you’re interested, check out the info here!
Hey everyone, the Family Support Institute of BC is offering their WayFinders series starting on March 2nd! WayFinders is a free program that supports person-centered planning. You can check out more information on the registration page here.
Here’s the schedule – you can attend one or more of the sessions when you register:
We posted this poem, “Ode to a Caregiver,” written by the mother of a person receiving home share services, back in March. We are sharing these inspirational words again at the end of our month focusing on posts and resources for caregivers, and we are inviting everyone to join in with us and say: THANK YOU, CAREGIVERS, FOR ALL YOU DO!
Hey everyone, we’re focusing our posts on CAREGIVERS and resources for caregivers this month. We know that one of the challenges faced by many caregivers is…finding sustainable ways to integrate connecting with other caregivers into a busy schedule.
While we’ve posted about the importance of self-care to caregivers, we wanted today’s discussion to be more focused on how connecting with others who have caregiving experience can help fight feelings of isolation and loneliness. With the COVID-19 pandemic changing how we all connect safely with one another, feeling isolated and lonely is more common than in the past. So, since we’ve posted about many ways for caregivers to connect, what’s are we bringing to the table today to try out?
Podcasts! If you haven’t listened to a podcast before, they are like individual radio shows and are usually released in episodes. Podcasts typically target a topic per episode. These podcasts in particular are designed to be relevant to the caregiving experience by those who put them out into the podcast-universe:
Besides the more obvious benefits of podcasts (running for a set amount of time per episode; covering a breadth of information about a given topic; facilitating discussion with and between people who have relevant experience) they can be a great tool to help caregivers feel that their struggles, challenges, and successes are genuinely seen, acknowledged, and respected. And – we hope! – support caregivers to feel a little less lonely and a little less isolated!
Let us know in the comments if you have a favorite podcast.
Hey everyone, we’re focusing our posts on CAREGIVERS and resources for caregivers this month. We know that one of the challenges faced by many caregivers is…making time and space to take good care of yourself, as a caregiver.
We’ve talked before about the dangers of compassion fatigue, caregiver stress, and burnout , and we posted about the Family Caregivers of BC resources available earlier this week.
It can be hard to know where to start with self-care, so we wanted to highlight the Family Caregivers of BC webinars as one way to start building your toolkit. There’s many webinars to choose from, but why not start with this one? It’s called “Caring for Yourself While Caring for Others” and covers compassion fatigue and how the body and mind deals with chronic stress, as well as what you as a caregiver can do to sustain and nourish yourself.
There’s additional resources available too:
PowerPoint slide deck for presentation
Exploring Your Relationship to Self and Others with Self-Compassion
Hey everyone, we’ve been posting a series to celebrate Community Inclusion Month. We have talked about where we’ve been, and about some current issues where we are and how to self-advocate. And so, as we end Community Inclusion Month, we wanted to leave you with some thoughts about where we’re going.
While it’s impossible to know the future, our hope for where we’re going is described best by Cole Blakeway: We are all DIFFERENT, and that’s AWESOME!
Hey everyone, as you know we’ve been posting topics for Community Inclusion month and last week we talked a bit about self advocacy.
A really important part of self advocacy is standing up for your own rights. We have a whole page that talks about rights and responsibilities here, complete with help to understand different kinds of rights, like:
Everyone has rights as a person in Canada, and rights as a person in BC. If you have a disability and you are getting supports, you also have rights as a person who uses the services of Community Living BC (CLBC).
With all those different kinds of rights in mind, we thought this would be a good time to remind ourselves about this awesome conversation that helped explore rights and responsibilities:
If you’ve got questions about rights and responsibilities, please let us know or leave us a comment.
Hey everyone, October 24-31 is PRIDE WEEK in Kelowna, and there are a whole bunch of events going on to celebrate 25 Years of Kelowna Pride! You can check it all out here, including the bike derby, trans and non-binary storytelling evening and social, pride festival and pride cabaret.
You can find Kelowna Pride Society on Instagram at the link below, on Facebook here, and you can read about Pride Week on KelownaNow.
https://www.instagram.com/p/CVQb3rgJCdP/?utm_source=ig_web_button_share_sheet
Hey everyone, we’ve been posting a series as part of Community Inclusion Month. Last week, we talked about where we’ve been in terms of disability rights and inclusion, and the work done by self-advocates who have brought the movement to where we are now. This week, we’re focusing on where we are by exploring some current issues and resources for self-advocacy.
So, what’s self-advocacy?
The BC People First Society (BCPF) talks about self-advocacy being what happens “when we stand up for our needs when they are not being met” and members help each other learn self-advocacy skills. Here is a video of the BCPF Advocacy Committee on Accessibility on YouTube.
The Self Advocate Net website has a whole page dedicated to self-advocacy topics, too, as well as a YouTube playlist of helpful videos here.
Here is an interview from Kelowna Now with Kelowna resident Shelley Decoste that was published on October 7th, to mark Community Inclusion Month. Shelley talks about her experiences and stereotypes about people with diverse abilities.
Here is a news article from CTV News about a young man from Toronto who is part of the Dear Everybody campaign put on each year by a rehabilitation hospital. He (and a team of young people with disabilities) are doing a virtual tour of classrooms and workplaces to talk about ableism.
What’s ableism?
Here’s how the Dear Everybody website explains it: Ableism is the discrimination towards someone based on their abilities, often favouring those who do not have a disability and seeing less value in those that do. And it needs to stop.
The idea is to get people talking about ableism, in order to end it — and that’s where self-advocates come in! Self-advocates can start great conversations about what’s wrong and how to fix it. You can see the videos made to start the Dear Everybody conversation here.
The Easter Seals website has a great idea on this page that would help start important conversations (like Shelley’s interview and like Dear Everybody). You can invite people you know to watch TED Talks about different disability issues, different people’s perspectives, and different experiences, and the then start a conversation about it, or a video chat, or have a talk on the phone. Or, if you’re interested in exploring another way to safely try out online community, you could post on the video page, a message board, or Facebook page, or post a comment below!
Check out the Easter Seals 10 suggested TED Talks about disability, accessibility, and inclusion to get started (printable list below).
