Kitsilano Neighbourhood House(KNH) contracted Finding Home to build capacity within their staff through proving our Community Engagement and Asset Mapping training with the goal to deliver seniors and elders asset mapping workshops throughout the West Side of Vancouver and produce a resource guide. By engaging over 100 seniors and elders from diverse backgrounds, including Musqueam Elders and Newcomer seniors, this project produced the West Side Seniors & Elders Resource Guide. The launch of the guide brought together seniors and elders, seniors service providers, the health sector, library staff and the City of Vancouver representatives. Some of the projects highlights include:
- Musqueam Elders Invite Newcomers
During the Finding Home asset-mapping workshop with Musqueam Elders, Larry Grant explained, “If you don’t know your language, you can’t know your culture and if you don’t know your culture, you can’t know yourself. If you don’t know yourself you can’t ever find a sense of home.” For Larry, knowing your language is key to finding home. During the workshop, the elders shared one of their challenges in finding and keeping a sense of home is that there are so many new waves of immigrants and sometimes newcomers don’t understand Musqueam history, contemporary politics and culture. This can lead to misunderstandings. They discussed how to solve this problem and decided they would like to extend an invitation to newcomers to attend their Musqueam 101 class on Wednesday evenings.
