HORIZON TWO BELONGING INNOVATIONS AT SKILLS SOCIETY

CommuniTEA is a mobile tea house, run by people with disabilities, that travels to neighbourhoods around our city creating “pop-up” town squares for people to come together, get to know each other and strengthen connections.

How it supports belonging and systems change

• In order to move from inclusion (physically present but socially distant) to belonging, it is important that people with disabilities play an active role in shaping spaces. This helps to create spaces where peoples’ authentic selves are welcome and celebrated, versus feeling they have to ‘fit the space’. The people with disabilities who run Tea Van take the lead in shaping the initiative and the social space at each event. People with disabilities, like every citizen, have an important role to play in shaping our communities, making them more welcoming and inclusive.

• Through positive encounters with people with disabilities as engaged and contributing citizens, CommuniTEA helps shift attitudes community members hold about people with disabilities

Skills Society, in partnership with a local developer, is excited to be piloting a ‘Community Concierge’ service within a new apartment building in Edmonton in February next year. The Community Concierge is a promising prototype that emerged from the Future of Home Lab, an 18 month social innovation lab that co-created with people with disabilities, funders, developers, and service providers, inclusive, accessible, and affordable housing and support models for people with disabilities. What’s also exciting about this partnership, is that the developer has made 12 suites within the building available to people supported by Skills at a deeply reduced rate. With a particular eye towards supporting the belonging of the residents that experience disability, the Community Concierge will use asset based community development principles to build a sense of community amongst all residents living in the building.

• Feeling you belong in your home is an important foundation for an inclusive home life.

• We often think that if we bring people together, relationships will form and experiences of belonging will just happen, but this is not always the case. The Community Concierge helps to create belonging by connecting people with similar interests and passions, curating community gatherings and shared experiences, and finding creative ways for residents to offer reciprocal supports to one another.

• We hope to also create a renter welcome package and agreement that incorporates a piece around residents supporting and cultivating a spirit of community and inclusion in the building. We see this as a promising way to build the foundation for experiences of belonging and helps to signal to all residents the role they play in building community.

The MyCompass Planning App re-designed case management to make disability services more humanized and centre the people we serve - helping them take the lead in planning and shaping their supports.

• Empowers the people we serve to take the lead in shaping and building what a good life is to them.

• Belonging is not static or something to be ‘achieved’, it’s ongoing and continually evolving. MyCompass incorporates principles of behavior change science and helps shape the way staff approach their work, being alongside people served, reflecting on and envisioning the good life not once a year, but continuously and being accountable to the wishes of the people we serve.

People labeled with complex service needs are a small subset of Albertans with developmental disabilities who face additional unique challenges such as mental health challenges, violent or destructive behavior, and chronic substance abuse. Services have not historically been designed with people labeled with complex service needs and do not adequately meet their needs; as a result this group often unfairly ends up involved in the criminal justice system, houseless, or relying on hospitals and other health systems. People with complex needs require unique support. We at Skills Society have been advocating to explore an innovation lab that will involve many community stakeholders to create training resources, toolkits, and policy recommendations around how to safely serve people with complex service needs, in a way that is empowering, rights-based, and supports community inclusion.

• Alongside people with complex needs and their allies, this project seeks to develop innovative support models that are not only coordinated (meaning involving several sectors and agencies in a cohesive way) but also inclusive, community based, and supports people to live their lives as anyone else would - alongside neighbors; connected to friends, family, and allies; with rich, varied, and meaningful, opportunities to contribute and participate in community life.

The Belonging Project is an inclusive research project and partnership between Skills Society and researchers at the University of Alberta and Dalhousie University. The project explores: (1) how belonging is experienced by citizens with intellectual disabilities, and (2) the conditions, processes, and actions that help and get in the way of the belonging of citizens with intellectual disabilities. As part of the project five people with intellectual disabilities:

• Invited researchers into their home to show them around, share their routines, and show different photos and objects that are important to them,

• Together with researchers, mapped belonging spaces and relationships,

• Took researchers out to different places and spaces where they felt a sense of belonging to show them what happens there,

• Introduced researchers to important friends, family, and support workers, and

• Created art that represented belonging to them.

• Using participatory methods and anchored in principles of equity and justice, the project helps us understand how belonging and exclusion is experienced from the perspective of people with disabilities themselves (a perspective that is often missing in academic research because it has been assumed people with disabilities cannot share their own perspectives).

• The project also helps us understand the complex conditions, processes, and actions that help and get in the way of belonging and will help identify possible areas for innovation and further exploration and imagination.

• Researchers are working with leaders at Skills Society to build and share knowledge from the project producing academic publications, presenting at conferences, and developing a tangible and interactive ‘toolkit’ of prompts that support workers can use to learn about, explore, and get better at supporting belonging in the lives of the people they serve.

Marla who receives supports from Skills and employees Tricia, Abby, Janvier, Edna, Ron and Yodit sharing artifacts that represent their cultural roots. As part of our work to continuously cultivate a sense of community and belonging within our Skills community, we launched a cultural awareness activity that all teams within the organization did. The activity was co-created by staff who sit on our equity, diversity, and inclusion committee and its purpose was to create space for staff to get to know their team members in maybe different ways, learn about one another’s cultural backgrounds, and build empathy and understanding amongst each other.