Recently, Finding Home facilitated a series of dialogues with Mandarin-speaking grandparents who are also caregivers during the day for their grandchildren. The dialogues were hosted by Kitsilano Neighbourhood House and funded by New Horizaons for Seniors Programs. During the dialogues the grandparents agreed that Mah-jong creates a sense of home for them. In China, they explained, everyone plays games together. If they could only have a place to play Mah-jong here in Canada, then they would finally feel at home.

The dialogue series consisted of three sessions. During the first session, we explored what home means, why it matters, what elements foster or erode a sense of belonging and what are their priority needs. The themes of the next two dialogues were customized around their top two priorities: Understanding Each Other and Creating Home in Canada. They shared stories and came up with innovative strategies. Read more…

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:

1. 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.

   Read more…

The ways in which we respond to personal, community and global challenges are rapidly changing. Whether it is loss of language; a lack of affordable housing; displacement through war or flood; or fundamental institutional changes, many people from across cultures and sectors are yearning for belonging, connection and safety or a sense of home.

We are certainly in a time of transition and change. Some conceptualize our current situation as being within humanity’s cyclical patterns. For example, Arnold Toynbee argued that, prior to the rise of a new era, violence increases and people tended to respond to stress, conflict, and change with less creativity and more rigidity. In addition, people experienced a pervasive disconnectedness from nature. Toynbee concluded, that as a creative minority re-examined values, they became the catalysts for a new way forward.

The Finding Home metaphor provides an opening for bringing diverse cultures, individuals and sectors together to examine home and the value of cultivating a sense of belonging, connection and community. Through dialogue and collaboration, the Finding Home Initiative supports communities and individuals to explore ways of fostering a sense of belonging; building inclusive communities; and of increasing effectiveness in addressing personal, local and global challenges.

Listen to Senator Dallaire’s thoughts on the Finding Home Initiative:

I was invited to give key the keynote address at Alberta’s provincial restorative justice conference “Fostering A Restorative Worldview.” As part of my preparation, I researched the origins of each “restorative” and “worldview.” I first drew from my research in Worldview Skills and started with the root of the word ‘worldview’ which comes from the German word “weltanschauung” and means “a comprehensive conception or image of the universe and humanity’s relationship to it.” This understanding of worldview is echoed in Thomas Berry’s definition, “A worldview is how a given culture sees its relationship to the rest of the universe, its creation at the beginning of time, and its beliefs about how human affairs should best fit into the bigger picture.”

Next, I investigated the word “restorative” and found one interesting definition, “that which restores; especially something to restore consciousness after a fainting fit.” This, of course led me to a definition of “faint” which includes, “to lose consciousness,” “to fail in courage or hope;” and “to grow weak, without enthusiasm or energy.” Perhaps, I thought, we can reframe our global situation to a collective fainting fit and all we need are some smelling salts to regain consciousness.

Indeed, when I looked up “smelling salts,” the definitions are: “a restorative” and “a means of restoring a person to consciousness.” Piecing these three words together shed a new light on the conference title. From this new perspective, “Fostering A Restorative Worldview” entails helping grow consciousness about our view of the world, each other and ourselves. Now we are getting somewhere interesting. At the conference this led to a rich discussion about what are the smelling salts of our times? How does growth and change happen? Perhaps, the values embedded in the definition of a fainting spell (consciousness, courage, hope, enthusiasm and energy) could be the smelling salts of our times. The next day we explored Rattlesnake Lessons About Change.

Keynote Addresses

Today, seniors from Seniors Services Society shared stories about what creates a sense of home for them. One senior said, “home is where you live with the love of your life.” Another senior responded, “that may be so for you…I sure did not have a husband like that!” While experiences of home differed, all agreed “the smell of mom’s cooking creates a sense of home for all of us.”

Frieda Hogg explained, “the worst thing about getting older isn’t that you lose your eyesight, it is that because of this loss of sight, you can’t read mom’s recipes.” As the dialogue series progressed, these seniors identified ‘making friends’ as their top “finding home” priority.’ Many of the seniors were widows and had lost their lifelong friends. All wanted to make more friends. They shared stories about friendship, coping with loneliness, and how to make friends.

Many talked about the friendships they had made in the last couple of years were all with new immigrants. To their delight they have discovered how newcomers make great friends. “Newcomers,” they said, are like us: “They have interesting lives and we both want to make friends and find a good home.” In addition, both seniors and newcomers yearn for the smell of mom’s cooking. These insights have led to a Seniors and Newcomers Dialogue Project with the goal to create a cookbook with mom’s recipes in audio and large print format.