Fran de la Luna, Building Caring Communities: Inclusion is not simply just an attitude, it really is about work.
Fran de la Luna came to Canada in 2001 from Singapore. And while they loved the city and decided to stay, they quickly became aware of the social isolation that is so often prevalent in Vancouver due to the weather and cultural attitudes. Instead of staying inside and moping like so many Vancouverites, Fran elected to do something about it by helping some of the people most vulnerable to exclusion from the community. Fran is now a community connector at Building Caring Communities, a group dedicated to helping people with disabilities to interact with and benefit from the community. We talked to Fran about experimentation, chance encounters, and pinball.
On the program: Building Caring Communities is an experimental group where we're doing a lot of social experiments to address social isolation and resiliency for folks with disabilities, particularly folks with developmental disabilities or cognitive disabilities.
On startup: The initiative came together as a result of collaboration of four disability agencies: posAbilities, the Burnaby Association for Community Inclusion, the Simon Fraser Society for Community Living, and Inclusion Powell River. The four agencies decided to tackle the question of what does it mean for folks with disabilities to live a meaningful life in the community?
On service: A lot of folks, after institutionalization ended, and they came out from the hospitals, they were spread out throughout Vancouver. There was a really big need to provide services for them. This could be anything from needing someone to come to your house and cook for you, or needing someone to take you to places. It's very service-based.
The four agencies realized that they were doing something that's not really great for folks with disabilities, because they are essentially providing them with good service but they're also isolating them from the community. There are people who have been living in their homes for 20 years and barely even know their neighbours. They don't have any interaction with the outside world. They don't have friends. Their life consists of schedules, contracts, agreements, reviews. A lot of staff are often time telling them what to do. But they don't really get the rich community experience.
On relationships: We're not trying to provide a service. We are trying to spend a lot of time with folks with disabilities to understand their lives. To understand what is it exactly that they're doing. What kind of lives they are living. And so where can we come in to address social isolation with them. We are actively taking a collaborative approach. We are always going to our folks and finding out what their interests are. What their passions are. What their gifts are. And that really started us out.
On clients: Everyone is different. For example, I'm working with five different individuals now and they each have different needs. It could be spending an hour or two with them a week. Weâll go for neighbourhood walks and do something called asset mapping, essentially asking questions like, âWhere are places you have found to be welcoming and inclusive? What do you consider as asset in this neighbourhood that you live in?" We do a lot of creative stuff because all the connectors [BCC staff] come from different backgrounds. Some of us have creative backgrounds. And then we'll do a lot of research in terms of how they interact with people. We go right down into it, really getting to know the people. We call it the extended first date. It could take six months, it could take three months, it could take a year. But whatever it takes for us to know this person so that we can bring them out into the community and then include it into their lives.
On Kudoz: We interface with Kudoz all the time. We have participants who go to Kudoz and we will go with them. Kudoz is a really great platform for us to introduce our participants who have very limited experiences to open up so that they can try different things. And through that experience with Kudoz we can connect. Oftentimes we find that when a participant's experience opens up, it changes their life pretty drastically.
On success: There's a lady who is in her 60's. She's been deemed by people who support her to be stubborn. She never wants to leave the house and she will never wake up early in the morning. We started working with her and we started understanding her life a little bit better. We know that she's afraid to meet people, so trying to plan to meet people is tough. So we changed the environment and said okay, what if we accidentally bump into people, even though we're trying to plan it a little bit. And we found that she opened up to that. She had no problems meeting people when you bumped into them. So that was a really interesting discovery for us to find out. She showed us an entirely different part of herself because we changed the way we're approaching it. Some of the barriers are coming down. This is going against everything people who know her are saying; no, she's stubborn, won't wake up, won't come out of the house. But she's proving all of them wrong and showing us that actually there is capacity to do it all.
On the tools of the trade: We use our individual backgrounds as connectors. We look at what's currently happening in the disability sector. We also look at tons of research papers. So far we've done research on things like friendship, motivation, resilience, trust and courage. We've gone through all these research papers on what we call determinacy of human resilience or human interaction. And then we just pull these theories out. We'll go to our board and we'll use something called human-centred design thinking and we'll try to work on some ideas that we have. A lot of time the ideas will come from either our own personal experiences or simply by saying, okay this is what's been done, lets try something else.
I bring a lot of the queer stuff in as well. I'm currently working with someone who is queer. We're doing the angle of what does it mean to be a queer person with a disability trying to tap into Vancouver's gay community.
On inclusion: Inclusion is not simply just an attitude, it really is about work. Inclusion is about spending time with someone to understand how they connect, how they express themselves, what their beliefs are and where we can find bridges around that. And having the patience to do that.
On changing attitudes: I stopped looking at folks with disabilities as folks with disabilities. I started looking at them as people. Very often times I've been put into my place but virtue of how awesome folks with disabilities are. They can do things that I cannot do. They can think about things that I cannot think. I have someone who I'm working with who plays heavy metal on the piano no problem. You throw him any heavy metal song, he will play it on the piano like nobody's business. Another guy that I work with, he's the Canadian pinball champion. He has a fan club. I was like, this is blowing my mind. We don't really have a normal society. We just have people. Different types of people, awesome people doing amazing stuff. And why they are labeled with a disability is beyond me. Sooner or later we're all going to be disabled because we're going to grow old. Iâm going to need someone to come clean my house. I'm going to maybe need help to pee. We're all going down that road eventually.
On what you can do: My simplest answer will always be to go find someone and spend time with them if you can. There are really great videos. There are really great books. You can volunteer. Kudoz is a good example, where you can be a host so you get at least a little bit of a glimpse of what interacting with someone with disabilities is.
You can check out what Fran and BCC are working on. You can also give directly to the agencies that support BCC: posAbilities, the Burnaby Association for Community Inclusion, the Simon Fraser Society for Community Living, and Inclusion Powell River.