Tuesday, August 3, 2010

The BC Housing/CMHA Partnership: Creating Community Through Recreation

"Recreation's purpose is not to kill time, but to make life;
not to keep a person occupied, but to keep them refreshed;
not to offer an escape from life, but to provide a discovery of life."
- Author unknown

For a time, Vancouver’s Grandview Terrace, a public housing development run by BC Housing, was a hard place to live. Morale was low, and to many residents daily life could be unnerving. Neighbourhood drug deals occurred in plain sight. Sex trade workers brazenly approached residents. Some tenants were fearful, anxious at every knock on their door.

BC Housing’s tenants can be the most vulnerable among us. Their problems include poverty, infirmity and disability, often dealt without ideal social or family supports.
BC Housing, intent on addressing the sense of isolation observed in their tenants, set about to find a new approach to enhance living situations and promote a sense of community at Grandview. In 2005 CMHA Vancouver-Burnaby Branch was asked to develop a high-quality therapeutic recreation program at the site. The idea was to create a safe environment where tenants could interact, recreate and acquire new skills. And so the program was born.

Tenants (and visitors) now cook and share meals, exercise together and even learn computer skills. The recreation partnership has promoted fitness, friendship, and an atmosphere of hope and vitality. What’s more, many tenants take a role in shaping program design, so the recreation programs themselves are constantly transformed and invigorated as new residents arrive.

Recreation is more than just having fun. It’s also about embracing challenges, broadening horizons and finding balance. Since the Grandview Terrace program started five years ago, BC Housing and CMHA Vancouver-Burnaby have expanded their partnership to include six developments! Each program is unique. Each helps tenants achieve a higher quality of life.

And now, Grandview Terrace is a place where laughter can be heard in the halls.

Is Downtime a Thing of the Past?

Is Downtime a Thing of the Past?

It’s been said that time is like water, in that neither can be compressed but both can evaporate. It likely seems to many of us that time, like fresh water, is in ever shortening supply. Job and family obligations fill our days. More than ever, we’re assailed by cell calls, emails and text messages from every direction and in each waking hour. So the question arises: Is ‘downtime’ a thing of the past?

Well, we should take hope. Studies suggest that North American men and women both have more leisure time than our counterparts fifty years ago. Evidently, what we lack is the knowledge, and perhaps a methodology, to use leisure time effectively.

So, what’s to know? Experts say we should understand two things:
• Productive leisure is any time used on interests or activities capable of creating a buffer between ourselves and the stressors in our daily lives
• Good health is a product, at least in part, of physical exercise, mental stimulation and the company of others. (This is why the CHMA Vancouver Burnaby Branch has established and seeks to expand activities and programs involving everything from athletics to the arts to day trips to Vancouver’s Capilano watershed.)

Apparently, the trick to using downtime well is to consciously carve periods out of our schedules for activities we find enjoyable and challenging, and then say “This is my time.” It’s immaterial whether the activity is chess, jogging, pet training, woodworking or volunteerism.

Indeed our circumstances and interests are intensely personal, and there may be as many Canadian leisure solutions as there are Canadians. And we can all think of success stories: the busy lawyer whose garden chores morphed into a passion for growing and hybridizing flowers (and a term as president of a provincial lily society), or the workaholic entrepreneur who found balance in his life through early morning tai chi classes on the waterfront.

The point is, if we volunteer to test our bodies and minds, especially in the company of others with like interests, we reap over time benefits like lower blood pressure, sharper thought processes and expanding circles of friends and acquaintances. Interestingly, leisure study participants who established a leisure regime identify a more immediate payoff: the feeling of being more in charge, and even a sense of freedom from that difficult quarterly report or looming deadline. Moreover, they say, problems seemed to assume more manageable proportions after a productive leisure session.

The experts acknowledge a kind of paradox here. The best downtime isn’t spent reclined in front of the television, which is typically spent in isolation and most often fails to fully engage us. Rather, good leisure comes from getting up, finding activities that work for us and having the self-regard to pursue them in a disciplined way.

Finally, leisure authorities say, we should if possible get “disconnected” during our downtime by turning off cell or other mobile devices. We’ll likely find the world can do without us for the sixty or ninety minutes it takes to pursue interests that fulfill us.