Write To Connect and the Community Living Campaign, Monday June 27 at 360 Valencia

Write To Connect is pleased to be offering a one-day workshop for the Community Living Campaign.

More about CLC

Over the past thirty-five years, a small but dedicated cadre of community leaders have laid a solid foundation, but their efforts have not kept pace with the growing challenges for a City that has the highest proportion of seniors and adults with disabilities of any urban area in California.

Far too many individuals end up in nursing homes or other institutions because community-based alternatives don’t exist. Increasingly San Francisco is viewed as a generous, but not very progressive, city as thousands of its residents are unnecessarily institutionalized both in and out of county.

In many ways, this campaign is really about giving seniors and adults with disabilities the right to decide where and how they will live their lives as they age and assuring that those institutions are more integrated and less isolated from their local community.

More than that, it is about making San Francisco a better place for us all. It is time to mow down the barriers caused by disability, age, language, discrimination, or other causes. It is time for us to take what we have learned and sow the seeds of hope, celebrating and having a bit of fun along the way (because, after all, isn’t that how a sense of community grows?)

As part of their mission, CLC takes part in Tyze networks. Tyze is an organization that creates social networking systems specifically designed to help people in need of long term care and emotional support.

Providing a supportive social network means building connections between our formal and informal systems of care. When there are friends and family members in an individual’s life, our health care and social services agencies (our formal systems of care) are looking for ways to collaborate with informal caregivers to create better health and social outcomes. In cases when a person does not have friends and family to support them, agencies are looking for ways to build community connections.

On Monday, June 27, W2C will give a workshop for CLC at the Mission Housing Development Computer Center at 360 Valencia. This class will focus on Creative Communications—how to use the internet to engage in meaningful or casual but heartfelt conversations, how to use blogs (including micro blogs like Facebook and Twitter) to express one’s interests and develop a personality online that allows one to build strong friendships.

These workshops take place regularly at 360 Valencia and seniors and persons with disabilities attend to practice their computer skills, develop their Tyze networks, and enhance their community building skills. Visit CLC to find out more about what their networks, such as: Bakers of Justice, Seeds of Hope Garden Project and the St. Francis Square Cooperative.