Inclusive Caring Community | Jewish Federation of Winnipeg

INCLUSIVE, CARING COMMUNITY

Connect and support each individual who faces challenges in life so they can fully engage in Jewish life in the most inclusive manner possible.

- Someone who is vulnerable is either vulnerable because they are not safe or feels vulnerable because they don’t feel welcome. The original statement was to “connect each of the most vulnerable in our community to Jewish life in the most inclusive manner possible”. This overall goal has been restated in more positive, inclusive language.

Strategic Goals

Accessible Jewish environments, with accommodation for a full range of disabilities
Comfortable Jewish environments that are affordable and accepting for any income range, mitigating the effects of poverty on access to Jewish community life
Reduced isolation for seniors
Support community members for the full cycle of needs from birth to burial with a Jewish context.

Explore Each Action Area

Accessibility and Inclusion

Reduce Isolation For Seniors

Mitigating Poverty

Other Services In the Caring Inventory

Choosing Priorities for Action:

Choose actions and collaborations that improve access to Jewish life for individual who faces challenges in life that inhibit that access, actions that are doable, have champions, and are sustainable.

Success of initiatives in creating inclusive, caring community is measured through feedback from the population about the benefits, counting the instances of improved access, i.e. individual empowerment.

Highlights – new in 2021/22:

Survey/focus groups with parents of children with special needs highlighted their need for a community navigator to help them access the resources they need, and gather as a community.

The matter of diversity and inclusion was divided into more manageable pieces. The Accessibility and Inclusion committee chose a project for 2022/23 to support Jewish organizations in improving accessibility. Education and Engagement took on Diversity and welcoming as a major context for the cross communal welcoming strategies. The Senior Concierge moved from Jewish Child and Family Service as a pilot project to a permanent home at Gwen Secter Creative Living Centre, with their first approved annual allocation from Federation for its ongoing service.

2022-23 Plans:

- Left on the agenda: address accessible, affordable kosher food needs.

- New initiative: strategic planning for Community wide Spiritual Care

Accessibility and Inclusion

Inventory:

- Most Jewish organizations have adopted appropriate policies, following the expectations of the MB Government’s Accessibility for Manitobans Act

• Federation vision for inclusion and policy

• Orientation for Jewish community staff and volunteers

• For more general resources see Accessibility MB

- All organizations are willing to make accommodations, not all have same level of experience

- Synagogues with ramps and some adaptations for low vision (large print siddur), bar mitzvah training for those with cognitive challenges provided privately, etc.

2016-2022 Actions

Put Inclusion on your Radar – Raising Awareness of special needs: Covid Adaptation: Virtual Q & A with the Winnipeg Police in winter 2021 on how they approach calls for assistance with someone who has a disability or mental health challenge. More than 70 participants found the presentation and answers reassuring and supportive.

Supporting parents and adults with special needs: Needs were identified in the spring of 2021. Planning began with focus groups for parents with young children who may be facing a cognitive or physical diagnosis, to find out what they and other new parents need to improve integration for their children into the community. The conclusion of parents, relevant community professional staff, and the volunteer committee was that the key to rebuilding parent support and coordinating across agencies was to begin with a Central cross communal resource person to provide referrals and access to all.

2022-23 Plans:

JCFS is working to establish a new staff position that will include support for families with children who have special needs. The Inclusion Committee will help recruit volunteers to support the new coordinator as navigators and parent guides. The new coordinator will be able to match like families for mutual support, recruit respite workers and aids and provide training as needed, and act as a Jewish community navigators. The Inclusion Committee will focus on offering reviews of organizational accessibility to
help improve access and awareness across the community.

Reduce Isolation For Seniors

Inventory:

- Older Adult Casework

- Targeted social, recreational and fitness programs

- Personal care home

- Kosher Meals on Wheels

- Senior Concierge

2022-23 Plans:

- Revisit priorities for housing, transportation, inter- generational programming and other viable strategies to improve quality of Jewish life for seniors.

- Extend Senior Concierge outreach to in person spaces.

2016-2022 Actions

- Gwen Secter Creative Living Centre expanded services to deliver more than 600 meals per week, arrange medical transportation rides, provide online concerts and classes, and call participants regularly. As a result of building this capacity in house, they were able to move Kosher Meals on Wheels in house.

- The Senior Concierge was launched in May 2020 with the hiring of the first staff person. The program was transferred to Gwen Secter Creative Living Centre in the summer of 2022, funded for the first time through Allocations as a cross communal service delivered by the agency in collaboration with the Sub- committee on Aging and the other seniors serving agencies. Under the auspices of the Sub-Committee on Aging, the partners continue to apply for grants to complete the budget requirements for this service.

19% of Jews

Were over the age of 65 in 2011 before the majority of Baby Boomers became seniors

(2011 National Household Survey)

>10% of Jews

Were over the age of 75 in 2011

(2011 National Household Survey)

Senior Concierge: a partnership with The Jewish Federation of Winnipeg and JCFS

The role of the Senior Concierge is to reach out to seniors in the Jewish community, so they remain connected and engaged. The senior concierge project is an initiative of the Jewish Federation of Winnipeg’s Sub-Committee on Aging, implementing the Community Forward plan, with Jewish Child and Family Service as the lead partner. The Senior Concierge works with all the Jewish community agencies that deliver service to seniors who are represented in the oversight of the Sub-Committee on Aging. The purpose is to reduce the isolation of seniors, which was commonplace before the pandemic, and essential to well-being during times of social isolation due to COVID.

The service includes new partnered services, supporting all the existing programs with central activities and referrals, and important personalized contact with seniors that ensure they have access to all the community has to offer. That personalized contact may be ongoing, referrals to public service if needed,

First year highlights during a year of closures:

Outreach - 237 meaningful (more than 5 minute) contacts, with 67 becoming regulars (once a month or more), 27 significant referrals to other agencies

Volunteerism – 15 referrals to Gwen Secter meal program, 21 volunteers actively supporting the Concierge’s programs.

New Programs and Services

- Current events discussion group by phone, two per week with 4 participants in each

- Taxi voucher program – previously administered by RJCC, connecting with dozens of seniors to facilitate access to transportation

- Creation of the online/telephone versions of JCFS’ Music and Memories program as well as the monthly Holocaust Survivors’ lunch

- Technology support for seniors with guidebooks and phone support so seniors can “see their grandchildren”, participate in synagogue services, etc., i.e. stay connected and active virtually, in conjunction with an iPad lending program and JCFS’s iPad lending program.

- Book Mobile delivery of satisfying reading material to individuals.

2022 Plans

- Establish Senior Concierge as an ongoing function.

- Revisit priorities for housing, transportation, etc. to examine viable strategies

Mitigating Poverty

Inventory:

Inventory: All of these are made available through Jewish Child and Family Service.

- Food security is supported with the Food Pantry and accompanying services including gift cards for grocery stores that promote dignity and independence.

- Financial Assistance Financial support available through JCFS from Tzedakah Fund, Asper helping hands, Vickar Fund, etc.

- Asper Helping Hands

2016-2021 Actions

- The committee met to focus on how to support Jews living with poverty for a variety of reasons. One of the key target groups for engagement in this context for welcoming and inclusion in the community is low income single parent families. While there were many good ideas tabled the pandemic halted all possibility of in person engagement.

- The committee also felt that it was important to undertake initiatives with volunteers in the Jewish community to support the systems that mitigate poverty in the general community. They started a volunteer initiative called Lunches with Love: See Volunteer Empowerment

2022-23 Plans:

New data from the 2021 census that becomes available in the coming year will help to provide focus.

Other Services In the Caring Inventory

The overall goal of supporting community members for the full cycle of needs from birth to burial with a Jewish context is met to a large extent with existing services. In addition to the specific services above, the following also address this goal. The first group are services delivered by Jewish Child and Family Service.

- Adoption services

- Child welfare – raising Jewish children whose parents can’t do it on their own

- Immigrant Settlement

- Counselling

- Addiction Services

- Mental Health

- Older Adult casework/support

- Chaplaincy

- Residential Group Home for adults with cognitive disabilities (Shalom Residences, In.)

- Independent life skills for young adults with cognitive disabilities (G.R.O.W. – Gaining Resources our Way)

- Personal Care Home (Simkin Centre)

- Special Buddies/Fun and Fitness with Friends/Other Adult programs (Rady JCC)