Building a Full Life + a Home of One’s Own in the Community: Report Now Available

Building a Full Life + a Home of One’s Own in the Community is a new report from Community Living Ontario that offers recommendations on individualized funding, housing, and community inclusion for people who have an intellectual disability. The report provides detailed guidance and insights, and will hopefully serve as a platform for meaningful discussion as the province moves forward … Read More

Why are Persons with Disabilities Being Placed in Long-term Facilities?

As an active member in the Community Living movement for decades, I have served on local, provincial and national boards. In these roles, I championed families in an association that sometimes forgot that families gave birth to the movement while almost exclusively focusing on the needs of individuals with intellectual disabilities. Over the years, however, as my parents aged and … Read More

Aging-in-Place for All

The statement that most caught my attention in the recently released Ontario COVID-19 Long-term Care Commission Report reads: The average age of long-term care residents . . . is 84. The Commission heard that residents typically enter a long-term care home in the last two years of their life, and that approximately 22,000 long-term care residents die every year. (p. 41) … Read More

Solaiman’s Story: Permission to Dream

Participating in Community Living Ontario’s Family Leadership Series opened Fauzia’s eyes to how Solaiman could lead a full life in his community. In early March 2020, Solaiman’s parents, Ahmed and Fauzia, watched with pride as Solaiman received his yellow belt in Karate, supported by his brother, Moazzam. Not long ago, the Reza family would never have imagined that this was … Read More

Long-Term Care Reports – Will the Right Thing Be Done?

Last week (end of April 2021), two reports were released that should influence the way government fixes its dysfunctional long-term care (LTC) system. The Office of the Auditor General of Ontario and Ontario’s Long-Term Care COVID-19 Commission laid out their conclusions and recommendations to fix the broken system that severely affected those citizens and staff who rely on the 625 … Read More

Make Aging in Place a Choice: We Can Help

In my 50+ years with Community Living, I have known only one person who wanted to return to an institution. In 1972, that man was brought out of the institution where he had grown up in Orillia. There he had enjoyed a favoured role delivering mail to the staff, and he generally had the run of the place. He found … Read More

Audrey Cole on Aging-in-Place

In an op-ed in December 2020, Judith Sandys and Trish Spindel spoke directly to Canadians who, themselves, have never been forced into insulting, disrespectful and inevitably threatening living (or dying) conditions. They argue that the time has truly come for society to provide appropriate funding and “real choice” rather than what, currently, we broadly refer to as “long-term care (LTC).” … Read More

Maurice Voisin on Aging-in-Place

The pandemic we have all experienced over the past year has reaffirmed to me the important role local associations for community living have in supporting people with disabilities in the community. I would like to share the journey we had with a gentleman we supported for over twenty years at our agency – South-East Grey Support Services. This gentleman was … Read More

An Illusion of Care

Linda Till in her role as a policy advisor to Seniors for Social Action Ontario (SSAO) is quite qualified to comment on the illusion of care in the long-term care sector. Linda witnessed first-hand the effects of institutionalization in the 1980s on children with disabilities in Homes for Special Care when she worked for CLO. Linda deconstructs the myth of high-intensity … Read More

Older Adults with Intellectual Disabilities and Aging-in-Place

Judith Sandys, a long-time educator, advocate and thoughtful leader in the community living movement writes about the power of “assumptions” in determining the kind of life a vulnerable person may get to live out. Sandys calls out the danger of limiting assumptions that may put people in harm’s way. The relationship between how one thinks and how one treats another … Read More