‘Fostering Dialogues,’ 2023. Multi-media digital collage. Toronto, Canada.
How can we improve homecare services for LGBTQ older adults?
PSW nurses and LGBTQ older adults engage in arts-based research to unfold the layered complexities of relations in homecare today.
Fostering Dialogues was an arts-based action research project that involved LGBTQ older adults and personal support homecare workers from Ontario in a 12-week arts & dialogue program. This program explored themes of home, care, and futures of community-based care through facilitated conversations, art-making, and co-creating a digital mural.
The main goal was to learn how arts-based action research can help to create connections among LGBTQ older adults and homecare PSWs — as groups from the global majority multiply in society and within care systems, to creatively reckon with present situations and to imagine what could be otherwise.
For HomeWebsite, click HERE
Facilitators: Celeste Pang and Dr. Brittany Jakubiec
Arts Facilitator: Melanie Schambach
Partner Organization: Egale Canada
Funders: Egale and Public Health Agency of Canada
"We rise together painting The potential and promise for community care and mutual aid was so tangible at the beginnings of the the lockdown and during the Black Lives Matter protests. Seattle had an autonomous zone! It seemed like we were on the precipice of change in the global west. Then people got tired. Maybe it was a form of compassion fatigue. The desire to go back to “normal” for so many when it leaves so many of us behind was heartbreaking. I want to remind myself and everyone that indeed, we are all we really need and change is happening. I just need to look to a different galaxy rather than the mainstream to see it."
Lori Guest