Timeline
June 2022 – June 2025
Who Cares? is a three-year, community-based research and arts initiative that brings together The Health Design Lab, Douglas College, and Deer Crossing The Art Farm. Set in the rural context of the Sunshine Coast, British Columbia, this collaboration explores how communities can foster and sustain a culture of care, especially in the face of increasing challenges posed by an aging population and an overstretched healthcare system. With the persistent limitations of traditional institutional elder care, growing issues of social isolation and loneliness among elders, and the severe impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, there is a need to develop new approaches that reimagine the possibilities for how we live and care with our elders.
Who Cares? responds to these complex issues by investigating how care is understood, practiced, and experienced across generations and community spaces. Utilizing arts-based, participatory co-design methods, and grounded in principles of emergent strategy, the project asks: How can we create the conditions for new possibilities of care to emerge, and how do we nurture them as a community?
Through cycles of listening, storytelling, and sharing, the project has unearthed both assets and challenges within the community: from stories of resilience and mutual support, to barriers created by systemic inequities. Who Cares? affirms that care is not solely the domain of institutions: it is also a shared, creative, and communal practice that belongs to all of us.
Research Questions
Over the course of this project, we held pop–up events at farmers markets, coffee shops and malls to gather inter-generational perspectives on aging from the Sunshine Coast community. We also held workshops in spaces where elders typically gather such as local senior centres and long-term care homes. We used participatory design methods focused on making and storytelling to facilitate dialogue and gather insights. Each engagement created conversations and relationships that lead to the emergence of the next set of activities. The engagements moved stories from person to person, gaining new insights and perspectives that added to a collective story built over time.
While working on this project, through a process of reflection and iteration, The Who Cares? team developed a framework for social change that describes key elements of our unique approach. This approach is informed by our multidisciplinary backgrounds in community-based participatory research, participatory co-design and community-engaged arts, and inspired by Adrienne Maree Brown’s Principles of Emergent Strategy.
The role of a Community Connector was vital to our engagement approach. At its core, the role of the Who Cares? Community Connector was to build connections (through casual conversations, phone interviews, and prior relationships) within the community that would enable our team to discover where elders tend to gather, find connection points for purposes of engagement, listen to the experiences and wisdom of those already working with elders and, together, build a picture of aging on the Coast.
Throughout her role, the Who Cares? Community Connector, Shannon Rody, kept a research journal discussing the hundreds of stories, concerns and ideas she heard from residents of the Sunshine Coast. The following is a page from a fictionalized recounting of a few of the real conversations Shannon had, illustrated by Jessica Ruffolo. You can read the full comic in the Who Cares? Publication.
A key element of the Who Cares? project is sharing our process, as well as our data, back with the community. Here are some of the ways we’ve done this:
By reading the final publication, we hope that individuals and organizations takeaway:
Additional information about the project can be found on our dedicated project website.
