News

Eden Conference a ‘Time to D.A.N.C.E.’

November 9th, 2017

Points West Living, along with its operations group Connecting Care, held its annual conference in Edmonton, October 11-13. The theme was the Eden-focused ‘Time to D.A.N.C.E.’, a reference to the memory care initiative D.A.N.C.E. (Dementia-And-Normal-Community-Engagement). The conference provided three days of action and education for 52 participants from 23 communities in Alberta, and one in Ontario.

Karen Boyer, Manager of Recreation & Community Development provides the following roundup of the conference:

The Eden Dancers

A dance performance by the “Eden Dancers” set the tone the first morning, with a special guest appearance of the “Border City Babes” maintaining the momentum. That evening, we all took public transit to enjoy an amazing evening theatre performance of Ubuntu (The Cape Town Project). The joint Canadian/South African production fit our theme perfectly. Ubuntu is a traditional Zulu word meaning ‘humanity to others’. It also means ‘I am what I am because of who we all are’, and describes a sense of unity between people through which we each discover our own strengths and virtues.

Educational focus

The educational focus of the conference was on the roll-out of our newly created memory care learning framework, D.A.N.C.E. There were also presentations about our history, our culture, a think tank to identify priorities, and contributions from the Recreation Therapists from PWL Red Deer and PWL Lloydminster/Pioneer House. Educators took resource material back home, with the goal of adding to the resources in the D.A.N.C.E. framework over the coming winter.

Focus on the 90%

We were joined on the final afternoon by 17 Home Office care partners for an afternoon workshop presented by Canadian motivational speaker, Darci Lang. Darci encouraged us to choose to maintain our focus on the 90% of things in our life that are good, and not on the 10% that are negative. She applies this message to four areas of life: our professional roles; with our co-workers; with our customers; and in our personal lives.

Eden Moments

We celebrated Eden Moments in our communities by handing out ‘Eden Awards’ for stories submitted throughout the last year. We laughed together, we cried together, and most of all, we learned together and left the conference excited to share what we learned and experienced.

Photo: Setting the stage to focus on D.A.N.C.E., the ‘Eden Dancers’ shake things up: (from front) Marlon Cruz, Corporate Educator; Kate Ninian, Quality Assurance Auditor; Georg Rath, Chief Operating Officer; Elithea de Villiers, Director of Health Services; and Stephanie Miller, Director of Wellness and Cultural Development. 

More photos at Flickr: Eden Conference a ‘Time to D.A.N.C.E.’