Interview with Leya Eguchi, Hollyburn Family Services Society

CNPEA: Tell me about your project.

Community agencies working with mental health and addictions across the North Shore, Squamish Nation and Tsleil-Waututh Nation came together for Honouring Our Past, Nurturing Our Future Project to promote knowledge exchange and collaboration. We worked with a population that has experienced multiple barriers in the past that are systemic. Often when people refer to barriers they think of an individual person’s problems, but this is not true of the groups we worked with. Systematic barriers create situations of ageism, discrimination, inequality and so on.

The project combines outreach to hard to reach seniors in conjunction with mentorship training, communication, literacy and skills training to manage community events. Trained mentors establish participant lead groups in their communities that in turn support and train other people in their community. There is a food cooperative component, which focuses on intergenerational collaboration between seniors and youth. The project is funded by Community Action Initiative.

CNPEA: How does your project address elder abuse?

The first way this project addresses elder abuse is by engaging hard to reach older adults. This project also provided a unique opportunity for community to come together on many subjects, elder abuse being one of them. Our organization has Victim Services that we an link participants with, but often in complex situations of elder abuse they may not want to use the resources. The target population of this project is hard to reach seniors. By training members of this population who will in turn educate other hard to reach seniors about community resources, it creates a network of people that can help each other.

Empowering people and mobilizing knowledge within a context where older adults connect with friends and community helps prevent elder abuse. Programs like ours that work with people who have experienced multiple barriers helps support them to create and maintain supportive relationships in community.

CNPEA: Can you tell me more about the community consultation process?

We met with 40 stakeholders and brainstormed what they would like the project to look like. We also conducted interviews with potential clients in the target population. All ideas came from this participant driven process. We supported a framework for the project but the ideas all came from the community. They identified needs and guided how best to address them. Part of the goal of this project was to pay participants for sharing their knowledge and creating a dynamic where everyone is an expert. This helps recognize their knowledge and time.

CNPEA: Can you give any tips for how to meaningfully engage community?

This project has a food security component. Serving food is a really big draw. Participants will be more likely to attend and contribute if they have food in their bellies. It is important to really listen to what people say and drive the project around those ideas. Creating a safe atmosphere is also really important: this means what is being shared needs to be confidential—no criticism or ridicule and talking respectively. When you establish this way of working it runs across the whole spectrum of participants—from volunteers to project coordinators everyone needs to be on the same page. Then it is more appealing for people to actually participate.

The theme of honouring people is essential. People want to be heard. Nobody is above anybody else in this project and power is horizontal; we are all here to give something that is unique to us. There is always going to be a power differential but you need to try to minimize it. Giving honorariums is one way of doing this. It is also really useful to have staff people working on the project that are knowledgeable about community resources. People need to trust that know you what is going on—i.e. that you are aware of the challenging systems to navigate and are offering to work together. This means adopting the perspective that it is not about anyone being inadequate or lacking skill to navigate a system themselves, but rather, it is really the system making things difficult. You need to show you get it.

CNPEA: Is there anything else you would like to share about your project?

Because funding was available we were able to do a large-scale community engagement and a full scale project. A lot of what we did could also be done with a smaller budget. It is a scalable mentorship program. Initially, when people were not yet committed to the project we used our budget for food and honorariums to encourage participation. By the end of the project people would have come down on their own but it was still useful to have those perks. I would encourage a participant based approach even if you do not have a large budget. Be creative and value spiritual, physical, emotional and cultural safety in community. Honour participants in a way that they feel heard and empowered.

Check out the project website for more information.