Festival of Flourishing
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The festival of Flourishing was a day long event that marked the launch of posAbilities 5 year strategic plan. The plan moves the organisation closer to their Vision 2028 of Good and Full Lives, for Everyone.
“Through this vision, we aim to support our community to move beyond the fulfilment of basic needs like shelter and food. We are setting out a path to meeting our higher-order needs for things like beauty, love, purpose, and more. This is the stuff of a flourishing life.”
On the 20th of June, folks from across the agency gathered at the Italian Cultural Centre to experience the Festival of Flourishing, which invited participants to explore 10 unique activation stations. These stations explored the theme of flourishing in artistic, playful and collaborative ways.
When one walked into the space, you were greeted by hosts at the welcome table, and the beautiful piano playing of Manuel Hii. This is where you would get a Passport to Flourishing, that symbolically represented the journey you were about to take. Each table was a destination, and you could get your passport stamped in order to win a prize! It was also a neat way of keeping track of all the places you visited at the festival.
The event officially began with CEO Fernando Coelho’s opening remarks and Elder, Shane Pointe’s traditional territorial welcome on behalf of the Musqueam peoples.
As you walked around the space, which was bustling with activity, you would encounter various interactive elements. People were excited and ready to engage with each other.
Our first stop? The Flourishing Kitchen.
The Flourishing Kitchen Activation was developed to begin to understand how the people of posAbilities (employees, individuals served, families) feel about their current state of flourishing. Folks were asked “What’s filling your cup right now when it comes to your flourishing?” and then were given 3 pompoms—1 large, 1 medium, and 1 small—and were invited to put them into mason jars labelled with components of flourishing.
At the end of the event we noticed that the biggest contributor to the flourishing of the people in the room on that day was being physically healthy, having a good attitude, and having fun.
Right next to the Flourishing Kitchen was a space to sit down and relax called the Conversation Café. Here folks could have informal conversations with people across the agency, those in decision making positions and those who were receiving services, sat down together to dig into questions around flourishing. Participants could choose the difficulty level of the questions they were responding to or asking and questions ranged from “what brings you joy?”, “what values do you live by” to “is there a part of your life you want to shake things up in?” and “where does your strength come from?”
Up next, folks got the chance to engage with a selection of Mini-Moments from Curiko. Curiko is a community-led platform for folks with and without disabilities to experience more moments of connection. Some moments that were shared at the festival included Calligraphy Blessings with Little Woo, Post-it Note Portraits with Steph and Reverse Colouring with Sarah.
“We really care about flourishing and hope that it is experienced in little and big moments throughout a person’s life. It was not hard to really connect well with the people that were sitting across from us and offer a real and really personal experience – something that offered a gift that they could walk away with.”
This year Curiko launched their artist in residence program, with their first residents - Sidney Gordon and Brittney Appleby.
Their activation for the festival was titled, Communal Expressions, and was focused on Handmade Cinema. They used the potential of this format to allow participants to reflect and connect to individual and collective experiences of flourishing.
“The Festival of Flourishing gave our project an interesting focus, one that everyone can relate to – that is – the aspects that contribute to a personalised joyful, flourishing life. Whether that be through a simple gesture, a material, shape, colour, object, or image; participants were able to demonstrate their answers to this prompt through various additive and subtractive techniques on 16mm film.”
These engagements were then collected and spliced together to create a group film, for further display at Alternative Creations Studio from the 7th to 11th of August, participants and viewers will be able to observe a collection of ways of seeing, and feeling to express overlapping experiences alone and in our community - so stay tuned for more to come!
When speaking with Christina of Alternative Creations Studio, she shared: “We wanted to create a workshop that explores who you are on the inside. To visually capture what cannot always be expressed verbally.” This was their intention since their art studio works with artists with varying disabilities and communication styles.
The Explore Identity station had examples that showed masks as 3D objects, where wire and colour came alive to tell a story. The intention was to understand how folks were feeling in the moment, and capture it on a mask in metaphor. Ideas around how calm may look rhythmic and subdued compared to an excited feeling where everything is heightened and loud, these were explored through a process of co-creation with festival guests.
Up next was Flourishing Tree activation with Real Talk. Real Talk is A sexual health initiative aimed at people living with cognitive disabilities.
Their activation focused on love - how people experience it, and what it needs to grow.
“To get people reflecting on the topic, we built a booth with descriptions of several different types of love, as catalogued by the ancient Greeks…Agape, or love for everyone is perhaps the most radical. This is a love that you extend to all people, whether family members or distant strangers. Eros, or sexual passion is named after the Greek god of fertility, and it represented the idea of sexual passion and desire. Ludus, or playful love is described as the playful affection between children or casual lovers. Philautia refers to self-love, Philia to deep friendship and Pragma to longstanding love.”
They then handed out cards to visitors that asked them to fill out what flourishing love looks like, and what conditions it needs to grow. Ideas then began to emerge across a giant tree installation that was at the station. As a thank you for participating, folks left with a seed. The intention was to plant the seed in order to grow more love in the world.
Over 50 people contributed to the tree and this is what they said:
Real Talk was also joined by Connecting Queer Communities. CQC is a social group for 2SLGBTQIA+ folks with cognitive disabilities to connect with each other, and with the broader queer community of the Lower Mainland and is a project started by Real Talk.
They hosted a Pushing Buttons station where folks could spend some time creating buttons about what brought them joy. This also gave people the chance to have more informal conversations about queerness and ask questions or seek answers if they were curious.
Then before you head outside, folks had a chance to interact with Stage Door, which is a program at posAbilities, that welcomes creative individuals with developmental disabilities who are seeking an opportunity to express their artistic gifts. The program provides camaraderie, skill building and training in theatre arts and stagecraft, digital storytelling, video and film production, music and movement.
And so of course at the festival, the Fun Time Photos station played homage to the theatre, and invited participants to have a little fun by putting on some components of costumes, and getting their photo taken. They then got to keep this photo as a memento of the festival!
There was space outside to explore stations as well! The wonderful folks from Imagine A Circle hosted a storytelling workshop. Personal stories of flourishing were shared in small groups, with graphics captured and then gifted to the storytellers as keepsakes.
Barb Goode, author and self-advocate shares: “The event was so much fun, it was awesome. I was part of the Imagine a Circle Storytelling Workshop. It was so nice to see people mingling with one another and enjoying themselves.”
And last but definitely not least, the Self Care station with Sam was meant to act as a space where folks could sit down on big comfortable bean bags or chairs and just relax if they needed a moment to decompress from the busyness of the festival. Sam had care caddies all set up with everything you would need to decompress.
With over 250 persons served, employees, family members, and volunteers filling up Trattoria Hall - this last stop on the journey was much needed and welcomed by participants.
