Kootenay Pride is hosting their first event of the year on Friday, May 20th from 8pm ‘til midnight at the Royal. This will be a fun evening to celebrate inclusion and equality for everyone, with awesome music from Mraki and our friend DJ Unalive. Tickets are $15 and can be purchased at https://www.theroyalnelson.com/events. All proceeds will go to the Christopher Moore Legacy Fund to help trans community members access gender-affirming care.
Hey everyone, the (previously postponed) Inclusion BC conference “Everybody Belongs!” is coming up in Surrey at the end of the month! You can get more information about the conference and register here.
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 areand 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!
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.
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.
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).
Hey everyone, we’ve been posting a series as part of Community Inclusion Month. We explored a bit last week about how we can participate in community while we all focus on keeping each other safe and healthy, using tools like technology and online communities.
We also talked about how everyone has a right to be included in their community – and, that this is part of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNCRPD).
So, why are we talking about it again this week?
We are looking at where we’ve been so that we can see how much progress we’ve made.
Progress on the road to community inclusion — like the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities — can take a long, long, long time. That UN Convention we were talking about? That only happened 15 years ago, in 2006. It’s important to remember what things were like for people with disabilities at the start of the disability rights movement.
If you’re interested in hearing more about what it was like to fight for the rights of people with disabilities, you can check out this video featuring Judith Heumann (a disability rights activist from the US). YouTube is a great resource to find other people with disabilities sharing their stories and experiences.
When we see people and organizations (like CLBC) promoting community inclusion, human rights, and the rights of people with disabilities, we are seeing how far we’ve come thanks to the work of self-advocates all over the world (like Judith) — and we celebrate their achievements as part of Community Inclusion Month!
Hey everyone, we posted last week to kick off Community Inclusion Month. This week, we are exploring community inclusion through how we participate. COMMUNITY is one of the 7 keys to citizenship listed in Inclusion BC’s video. Everyone has a right to be included in their community. It’s part of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNCRPD), check it out here.
Given that we are still battling the COVID-19 pandemic, we can consider how we want to participate in community while still keeping ourselves and others safe and healthy — such as getting outside into local parks (like the upcoming Spooktacular Pumpkin Walk coming up in Kelowna), or participating in an online community, like on the Inclusion BC Facebook page, through an event listed in the Family Support Institute’s Calendar for Connection (like the upcoming Halloween Howl), or alongside your favorite interests and hobbies (like on Pinterest) — or, in the comments section here, too!
Want to hear more about online communities? Let us know in the comments!
Hey everyone, October is COMMUNITY INCLUSION MONTH – so let’s celebrate inclusion in our communities!
All month long, we will be posting ways to celebrate inclusion, ways to build inclusion, and ways to explore the meaning of inclusion.
To get started, here are some places you can check out all month long for community inclusion month information, events, and posts:
Here is the page for CLBC’s Widening Our World (WOW) Awards, which will be updated with this year’s winners during Community Inclusion Month. The awards this year will focus on people who helped make a difference in the lives of people with diverse abilities through the COVID-19 pandemic.
Inclusion Canada also has a webpage about deinstitutionalization in Canada. Check out these powerful milestones, experiences, and progress in community inclusion here.
Hey everyone, as we already posted, we had a federal election yesterday (Monday, September 20th).
Elections Canada wants voting to be as accessible as possible. Leading up to the election, Elections Canada offered resources, information, and help to vote leading up to general election day (September 20th).
Now you can tell them how accessible voting was for YOU!
