Keenan Wellar Classification Speech Rotary Club of West Ottawa, March 5, 2013

Editor's Notes

1. Before classification, clarification! I am the Co-Leader and Director of Communications for LiveWorkPlay, a charitable organization in Ottawa. LiveWorkPlay is a corporate member of Rotary Club of West Ottawa, and the focus of that relationship is on Rotary at Work an initiative of districts 6290, 6400, 7070,7090 and now 7040 (our district) to bring together employers and employees with disabilities. LiveWorkPlay is most frequently represented at meetings of this club by Jennifer Bosworth, our Manager of Employment Supports, and Ali Sochasky, our Coordinator of Employment Supports. And last but certainly not least the reason it says Co-Leader in my title is because I am also a Co-Founder of the organization, the other founder being Julie Kingstone. That was back in 1995. Six years after that in 2001, Julie and I realized we’d never have time to meet anybody else, so we went ahead and got married. So hopefully that’s not too confusing, and I’ll get back to some of this later.
2. That’s me on the right with my best friend Sean Malone, who is one of the few classmates from my Nepean High School days that I am still close with today. Sean looks pretty much exactly the same today but with less hair. I am pleased to say that although I too have less hair and it has changed colour, I am mostly pleased with the rest of the changes and that I look a little less like a skinny gorilla.After high school I started out in the Department of English at Ottawa University, quickly realized that the expectations of prose writing were far too fanciful for me, and after switching to the Department of History I found my way. I was largely fascinated with the WWII and Cold War era. I flirted with the idea of staying in the field but through happenstance in my employment life that I’ll talk about later, I ended up at Teachers College and completing my Bachelor of Education and Ontario Teacher Certification.Once again through career happenstance I ended up on Carleton University campus, and literally stumbled upon the MA Applied Linguistics and Discourse Studies program, which I completed part-time over the course of about 6 years. It’s often assumed that such a program is for those who are studying languages, but in fact I was studying language usage, and in committing to working for LiveWorkPlay full-time in 1997, the focus of most of my Master’s program was related to communication in non-profit organizations and social services systems.Starting in 2009, I started getting a lot of requests to for workshops, seminars, and speeches in the non-profit community, and I realized that what most people wanted from me had to do with non-profit marketing, or what some call social marketing. That was very flattering except I wasn’t so sure I knew what I was talking about, so I completed a professional program at the Sprott School of Business in 2010 which more than anything helped confirm I’d been on the right track. This contributed to the decision in 2012 to more clearly define the areas of responsibility for my co-leadership at LiveWorkPlay, and I became the Director of Communications while Julie became the Director of Operations. More about work later.
3. Julie and I met through mutual friends back in university, she’s 5 years younger than I am, but my level of maturity was and is lower than hers, so that age gap has never been a problem. Julie came from a background of working with underprivileged children and teens mainly at Christie Lake Camp where the remarkable Dr. Dan Offord was her mentor. Soon after meeting Julie I had started working on a non-profit start-up organization and I was doing one-to-one work with a lot of young people with intellectual disabilities, and this was in such demand from local families that I could meet all the requests. I asked a small team of people including Julie if they wanted to join me in delivering these services, and so we ended up working together quite often. The joke I like to tell is that Julie came over to work on a project and never left. Those are my parents Barry and Marjorie with my nephew Jackson, my nieces Jane and Flannery, and my sister Marnie. The short story of my parents is they come from Northern Ontario, they met at Cobalt High School. My father had a tough start life,: he survived polio and also various serious mishaps including a serious burn while working on a pipeline. My father first attended Queen’s before going on to complete his MA and PhD at Northwestern.My mother worked as an office clerk to support the family and we moved to Ottawa when I was 3 years old back in 1971 where my father worked for the federal government in urban and regional planning, before going on to a long career as a professor of urban geography at the University of Ottawa. He continues to work and is in frequent demand as a speaker and consultant.What having these two parents has meant mainly for me I will boil down to two things: 1) I have never experienced poverty or experienced worry about personal poverty in any real way 2) I have always understood that I was privileged and that I have a responsibility to the wider community. My mother and father were activists in different areas than my current focus, but being around the constant buzz of community meetings and discussions certainly influenced my own view on what it means to be a responsible citizen.
4. I’ve listed a couple of personal passions, both of which I share with Julie, being a tennis fan is one of them, and I am thrilled to be able to combine that with absolutely shameless Canadian patriotism now that we have a world top 15 player in Milos Raonic. We most recently followed him down to the US Open in New York City where we hung out with him in the airport. During his tennis match against James Blake, I paired up with one of the only other Canadians in the crowd and we proudly stood loud and proud against 10,000 Americans.One of our other shared passions is kayaking, which we’ve been doing for about 12 years. This has gotten easier since our decision in 2011 to purchase a simple cottage in the South Frontenac region on North Otter Lake. I’ve been on the verge of exhaustion for most of my adult life and have always struggled with the entire concept of relaxation, but this past summer I truly found some peace and I’ve started to see how I could learn to enjoy life differently.
5. I love photography and videography, these are some recent examples. We have a huge population of Northern Watersnakes at the cottage, and some of them have become quite comfortable to share the dock with us. We had an exciting visit from trumpeter swans which I understand are making a comeback and may be seen more frequently stopping over during migration, and of course we’ve got a wonderful Blanding’s turtle, a lovely white-tailed deer fawn, and a black bear that is likely in his senior years.
6. On a final personal note, as some of you heard on CBC Ottawa Morning last Friday, my wife and I have applied to appear on Amazing Race Canada, if you are fans of the show, check us out at thebeeteam.tv and if you are not fans of the show, I promise you’ll get a laugh out of it anyway.
7. My career history in brief, I always had a little bit of entrepreneurial spirit one of my first jobs was my own enterprise called The Keen Machine, I cut lawns in the summer and I clear driveways in the winter. Little did I know but at the age of 14, I was to experience disposable income at a high level that has yet to be repeated.I worked as a server at Britannia Yacht Club, I parked cars at the Chateau Laurier, I taught skating with the City of Ottawa, I did overnight shifts as a security guard, and I worked with kids as an after school program supervisor.
8. By fluke I ended up on the career path that changed my life, when I applied for a part-time job working with teens and adults with developmental challenges. I thought the term developmental challenges had something to do with being economically disadvantaged, but it turned out the job actually involved people with intellectual disabilities, which includes for example individuals who have Down syndrome. I had no experience – in fact, I don’t think I’d ever met a person with an intellectual disability!Somehow I flubbed my way through the interview and got the job. My life was changed through a single word that might seem rather uninspiring: NOTHING. Because when I started asking individuals with intellectual disabilities about their lives: their hopes, their dreams, their plans – quite often their response, sometime literally, was that they were doing NOTHING. Living at home with their aging parents, no job, no plans, no friends.This motivated me to find out more and think about how I might make a difference.
9. I graduated university in 1991 without any clear plans and I ended up as a teaching assistant in the Community Living class at Queen Mary Street Public School. Putting kids in a Community Living class is basically a sanitized way of saying that they are going to be segregated from the rest of the kids in the school.I didn’t think that was right. So I thought what I would do is become a teacher and try to change the system from the inside, so off I went to teacher’s college, where I learned that although I enjoyed many aspects of teaching, it is not a place where there is a lot of room to innovate, at least not at the systems level. I felt claustrophobic and decided it was not for me.
10. In the previous photo the teacher I worked for at Queen Mary Street School reconnected with me after I finished teacher’s college. He respected my reasons for not wanting to go into the profession, and a few weeks later told me that he’d been approached about a business opportunity to work for a private sector company on a federal project called SchoolNet. He recommended they speak to me.Next thing I knew, I was working for a start-up software engineering company on a major federal government contract operating a national internet network for special education teachers. This sounds great, the only issue was, I’d never seen the internet. Once again, I somehow got through the interview and got the job. I was one of the few staff members without an engineering background, and it was like learning a new language (in addition to having to learn various computer languages).It was an exciting two years and very successful from many perspectives, but once again, it knew long term it wasn’t for me. This job provided cognitively challenging and creative opportunities, but spiritually, something was missing, and I knew neither money nor career advancement in the IT sector would be the answer for me.
11. I’ve got to make a very long story short to tell you about LiveWorkPlay. It started out as a grassroots volunteer initiative to provide support and advocacy to people with intellectual disabilities and their families, and from there it turned into what may well be a lifelong vocation.I started working full-time at LiveWorkPlay in 1997 at the age of 28. I’m 44 now, so well over half of my adult life has been with LiveWorkPlay. I know many of you hear have heard a lot about how we bring together employers and employees with intellectual disabilities, but LiveWorkPlay provides more than employment supports, which represents about 1/3 of our activity.We have a full-time staff of 11, about 120 volunteers, and we work with 80-100 people with intellectual disabilities in any given year. In addition to employment, we help them with affordable housing and to connect with other citizens in the community to enjoy clubs, courses, classes, recreation, sports, arts, culture, and citizenship. We own 7 condominium units in the west end, and we work closely with non-profit housing providers like CCOC, Centretown Citizens Ottawa Corporation.Please check out the Spring edition of Ottawa Family Living Magazine for a very nice summary of the organization and its work.
12. What’s it all about? Basically we’re working with one of the most excluded and marginalized populations in our community, some of that is attitudinal, but a lot of it is systemic. We (citizens of Ontario) put a lot of precious tax dollars into keeping people with intellectual disabilities separated from “the rest of us.” We separate them in education, vocation, recreation, housing…everything.The result of this of course is a very poor quality of life for those individuals, but also, everyone else in the community is missing out from the value that people with intellectual disabilities bring to the human family, just like how me miss out by exclusion based on economic classes, races, or genders…I’m privileged to know how much better my life is because I have people with intellectual disabilities as part of my routine experience. But most people are not having that experience, and we are in essence using scarce resources for an exclusionary outcome that has few benefits and many drawbacks.
13. I’ll focus on four of my community service areas of interest which are related to my work at LiveWorkPlay but which I explore in other capacities as a volunteer with other people and organizations. These include Employment of People with Disabilities, Non-Profit Governance (Policy Governance), Youth Engagement in Voluntary Sector, Social Media for Social Change.
14. With respect to employment, I do advocacy and policy work, often in association with Community Living Ontario and the Canadian Association for Community Living. In April I’ll be contributing to the Standing Committee on Human Resources, Skills and Social Development and the Status of Persons with Disabilities in April as a follow up to the recent release of the report of the federal panel on labour market participation.One of my other roles is generating awareness and I’ve partnered with United Way Ottawa as a Focus Area Champion, which I share with Police Chief Bordeleau and 6 other volunteer appointees. I had a real thrill at the United Way launch event this year with the opportunity to highlight this issue in front of an audience of more than 1000.I participate in media awareness campaigns in print, radio, and television, and of course social media.Last but not least, I also help fundraise for the Belonging To Community focus area and funding stream of United Way Ottawa by participating in campaign launch events at local companies.
15. I’ve served on a lot of boards over the years, for charities, community associations, and other non-profits and I’m very concerned about the state of non-profit governance. I think we’ve drifted quite far from our charitable roots which were about solving problems, and instead we are focused on who writes the cheques, and on the operation of programs (without evaluation that is linked to creating positive change in the community).If I look ahead a decade or so and imagine a scenario where I’ve moved on from LiveWorkPlay and I’ve taken on a new vocation, I would be interested in working with leaders of non-profit organizations on governance issues.It seems to me that the Rotary four-way test is as relevant and important as ever:Is it the TRUTH?Is it FAIR to all concerned?Does it promote GOOD WILL and BETTER FRIENDSHIP?Will it be BENEFICIAL to all concerned?I believe any non-profit organization should hold itself to standards that have a clear focus on moral ownership and the “ends” that are to be realized for the community. Providing strategic leadership to the organization should be the board's key responsibility, by clearly defining, on behalf of the owners, what human needs are to be met, for whom, and at what worth.
16. One of the consequences of the current status of non-profit management is also that we are failing to attract the interest of younger generations. They think and work differently. They don’t like big binders full of paper and big long meetings. It’s not because they don’t want to work hard, it’s because they want to work differently. They also want to have a very clear understanding of how their investment of time, money, and reputation will create a tangible result that they understand and support.Many young people are simply ignoring charitable structures and organizing more informally to solve community problems. This, of course, is not a bad thing. However, I believe there are benefits to structures (such as long-term sustainability) that could help young people realize their community service goals. And charitable organizations are always in need of renewal, which simply cannot happen without successfully engaging younger generations.I know at Rotary Club of West Ottawa there are ongoing discussions about how to engage new members of all ages, and that RCWO is in fact experimenting with new corporate membership structures. I’m pleased to be a part of that experiment. I would not be able to fulfill the traditional requirements of a Rotary member, but I feel that I am benefiting and hopefully finding ways to contribute through the corporate membership.
17. A related topic to engagement of young people is social media. If a non-profit organization wants to discourage potential young volunteers and donors, a great way to do it is to make sure they are not using any social media. I’ve done my own research on this, and it’s pretty close to 100% of people under 30 who will not consider engagement with an organization that does not use social media. This makes sense. They have grown up with smart phones in their hands. It is not a novelty for them, it is a way of life. It is not just for fun. They use social media to learn and to solve problems big and small.I have seen firsthand the benefits of social media for engaging others in a social cause or in the pursuit of a social change. I would encourage all non-profit organizations to learn how to incorporate the use of social media as part of an integrated social marketing plan. In addition to improving the appeal of the organization to younger generations, I have heard many times that strategizing about social media has helped improve global organizational communications.
18. What do I get out of Rotary? In addition to the obvious linkages I’ve spoken about already, my world is very small, whereas at any given Rotary meeting you are going to hear from people making a difference around the corner as well as around the world. I am in awe of the international projects related to everything from eradication of polio in India to safe drinking water in Africa. I am grateful for the opportunity to be a part of it.Lastly, as I look around the room, it is humbling to know that everyone here is living a life of service to community. It is good to be humbled in this way, so as to resist the tendency to complacency and to derive motivation from the amazing energy and drive of the Rotary community.Thank you.