70 Years of Doing the Impossible

The Developmental Disabilities Association's Executive Director Alanna Hendren talks about the association's 70th anniversary, where the organization has been, and where it's headed in the 21st century. A staunch advocate for people with developmental disabilities, Alanna Hendren has been involved in this sector for over 40 years.

 

TRANSCRIPT

70 Years of Doing the Impossible

 

00:05
Hello again, welcome to another episode of DDA's Encouraging Abilities podcast. I am your host, DDA's Communications Manager, Evan Kelly. Now this is a special podcast because we are focusing on Developmental Disabilities Association's 70th Anniversary.

00:20
So for 70 years, and from a very humble start, DDA has been advocating, supporting, and transforming the lives of people with developmental disabilities. So since 1952 to 2022, I should say, we in the organization's pioneers have been moving mountains, transforming the social and political landscape for some of society's most vulnerable people here in BC and even across Canada. I'll try to offer the abridged version to listeners. Now DDA began when a woman by the name of B. Purdy

00:50
B birth to a boy who had Down syndrome in the late 30s. Conventional wisdom of the time would be to have him live his life in an institution. So B pretty went against that thinking and kept him at home in the community where he belonged. She would gather about a dozen other families and start educating their children in a church basement here in Vancouver. Now through lobbying the provincial government they gained funding to open the first publicly funded special needs school in Canada. That was just one of many innovations.

01:20
big fast forward to here in 2022 where DDA has over 500 staff and supports about 2,000 people and their families every year. We have numerous programs from early intervention and infant development to robust employment programs and many fun and educational programs for families in Richmond and Vancouver. So joining me today is our very own executive director Alana Hendron. Alana has been a leader of the developmental disabilities field for over

01:50
She received commendations for her contributions to the downsizing of institutions in BC by developing community services and promoting inclusion. As Executive Director of DDA for the last 25 years, she has worked with board members and staff teams to build a strong financial foundation and innovative quality support for individuals with developmental disabilities and their families.

02:16
So thank you for joining us. Now 70 years, what do you think about when you hear that number? Well, I think 70 years is just fantastic. And certainly the progress that we've seen over that 70 years has been phenomenal. Our goal is to continue to drive it forward and continue to advocate for inclusion for everybody, not just people with developmental disabilities, but everybody.

02:45
uh... because we know that in the in an inclusive world everybody wins you've been in this uh... field for forty years what made you decide to get into this line of work well i always had this drive to help people and i wish i had a drive to make money or do other things but i always wanted to help people so when i finished university i got a degree in psychology

03:11
and realized that a lot of people didn't want my help. There's a lot of people who have a lot of problems, but they don't really care. So I worked with people who had substance abuse disorders before I worked at Pearson Hospital. And when I worked at Pearson Hospital, what I found was that the folks who lived there loved attention, they really appreciated any help.

03:40
Sometimes they appreciated somebody just saying good morning to them. So I realized that people with disabilities were a group that were in the position they were in through no fault of their own. There certainly was not a choice. And they really wanted to develop and learn and participate in the community in a way that my skills could be beneficial.

04:10
And so, how did you get involved with DDA then? Well, I've known about DDA, of course, since I entered the field, because it was the first agency in all of Vancouver. When I worked at the Sammy Imelho Society, of course, DDA was a leading, it had developed so many new innovative projects, that it was an organization that people wanted to be a part of.

04:38
At Sam Yamu House, it was a smaller organization in White Rocks House, Surrey. It was a great place to work. I loved the people, but I was looking for a bigger challenge. So that's when I came to DDA. And during my time at Sam Yamu House, I was involved in supporting B. Purdy's son. So having been involved working with Bob,

05:04
I had a chance to meet B. Purdy and had done a little history of Samy Amuha Society, so I spent a lot of time with her talking about how the association started, what some of their challenges were, how she overcame them, and what she thought about the whole sector developing around her original ideas. Yeah, now she, of course, as we mentioned, is DDA's founder. What was she like as a person?

05:33
She was a very formidable woman. If she wanted something, she would go out and get it. And if she was not pleased with the service that she was receiving for her son, she would more than let you know it and offer solutions, which a lot of times people complain, but they don't offer you the solutions, whereas as Bea did. And she had a great deal of love for her son, Ba, who had Down syndrome and was a real character.

06:03
And the problem was I spent time at her house and she had this picture of Bob when he was a child with his brother John. So when I finally met brother John I was shocked that he was a senior citizen.

06:20
and we lost Bobby.

06:22
I think he was about in his 50s. Yes, he was. He was playing baseball and was running around after hitting a home run, and he had a heart attack, unfortunately. But he was always very happy that he died doing something that he really enjoyed. Yeah, that's, I mean, you know, his brother John has told me that story as well. It's, I mean, it's hard, almost hard not to smile at that. Yeah, yeah. Getting hit in the head, running around second, and having a heart attack. But that was the kind of guy Bob was.

06:52
be very lucky. I mean all sorts of people loved him. He was very friendly, he had a great sense of humor, and had been offered the best that life had to offer at the time that he was around. So what was DDA like when you started here?

07:13
Well, when I started, the association had a lot of financial problems. So that was the biggest challenge, sort of right off the bat. Then there were other problems, like the computer systems weren't very well developed. There were a lot of...

07:34
problems. But when I first came, you know, the number one challenge was balancing our budget, getting out of a deficit. We were in a negative equity situation, so that could not be sustained. We had lots of great staff, but they weren't organized in a very systematic way, so policies tended to be different depending on what department you might be in or whatever. So it was

08:03
The main goal was to make some money and bring everybody in DDA together so that we were all sort of rowing in the same direction and not at cross purposes. Sort of streamline the process and kind of make it better. And was that just your vision that you brought to the organization? No I think it was my assessment of what needed to be done and certainly the board was very keen to you know to get over our financial problems.

08:32
And so what changes have you managed to bring to DDA that sort of stand out for you? Well, the first change had to be cultural because DDA had endured a strike. And during this strike there was a huge amount of resentment between the bargaining unit staff, which was the majority of our staff, and head office. So there was this really negative perception of head office. And in many ways it was well earned.

08:58
There was not a lot of consistent policy, as I say. There were a lot of the human resource practices were certainly not best practices. And we had people who worked in child care that didn't even know residential existed, and people in vocational services that sort of did whatever they wanted instead of things that were productive for each client. So there were a lot of outstanding HR issues to deal with as well.

09:28
How do you measure success in your position? Was that where the board members guided? Or do you sort of?

09:39
look at yourself and go, okay, this is successful, this isn't. How do you measure it? Well, most executive directors or CEOs are measured by their financial success. So on that measurement, we've been extremely successful because we had one thing we don't talk a lot about now is our business, which was our partnership with Value Village and all the clothes that we picked up and sold. It turned out that the business had a lot of potential.

10:09
when I first came to DDA is that there was just so much potential. It just had sort of crumbled over the last previous, say, decade. You want to look at the financial stability of the organization and the success. You want to look at employee satisfaction, client satisfaction for sure. And when I first arrived, there were a lot of families that were extremely dissatisfied with the services they were getting.

10:37
to the point that we had regular town halls and got yelled at a lot. And a lot of the families were quite correct.

10:45
So the first thing we had to focus on is how do you turn a culture around to start refocusing on the people that we support instead of themselves or what's going on in the sector or what families want or the million and one other things that come up. So one of the things that we did was come up with Alchemist, which was a way to plan

11:15
plans for each individual client. So one thing we knew we wanted to do was not to babysit people but to actually figure out what their goals were and what were their dreams and their wishes. So in doing that, we actually ended up re-viewing all of our vocational sites and we ended up moving them all in a very short period of time.

11:41
There was also legislation that passed that was coming into effect that said anything that looked like work was work and everybody who did work needed to be paid minimum wage. So there were a lot of clients who were making a dollar, two dollars a day under the old sheltered workshop system and that was deemed exploitive, which clearly it was, although it was considered an activity kind of program.

12:07
So what we did is we ended up interviewing every one of our individuals that we served in day programs and their families and developed a plan in terms of what they wanted to do. The majority did not want to sit in a sheltered workshop.

12:25
There were people who wanted to do a lot more recreation, a lot more education, a lot more community awareness and community involvement. People wanted to volunteer, people wanted to work. We already had a great program going with Jobs West in terms of employment, so we supported that.

12:44
And there were people who still wanted a sheltered environment because they had worked in that environment for all their lives and felt that that was the perfect place for them. They had tried working in the community, didn't like it, and just felt that they needed that extra support. So we figured out a way to pay the minimum wage when we started Star Wars, which we consider sort of a little business within DDA. But.

13:09
The goal of the business was not to make money, it was to employ people. And we're very, very happy that we've been able to employ hundreds of people at Star Works and help some of them move on to paid employment outside of the sheltered environment. It generates revenue, nearly a quarter of a million. Yeah. More than a quarter of a million this year. Yeah, so that just lets us hire more people. Yeah, and that's just one of the big things where DDA has been an innovator. So what are some other ways

13:39
over the past seven years where DDA really has sort of raised that bar of innovation? Well I think Alchemist was an innovation because it used computers to help us determine how many hours of support everybody needed in order for their wishes and goals to materialize. So that helped focus everybody on clients. It helped focus people on the...

14:05
people we support as developing human beings instead of people who are just in need of basic care. It really allowed families to get involved in the planning, which they hadn't necessarily been before. So that was the big thing, was focusing everybody on each individual and what they wanted.

14:28
The other thing that needed to be supported, of course, is the staff, because they're not going to be too keen about supporting individuals if they themselves feel that they're not valued. And certainly the wages that we've paid over the years have shown a lot of people who work in this sector that they weren't as valued as they should be, and I totally agree with them.

14:51
So one thing I've spent most of my life doing is lobbying for higher wages for the staff who work for us because people think anybody can do it and they can't. It's a hard job. It requires talent. It requires creativity. It requires in some cases a lot of thinking about how to approach people based on their

15:21
It takes education and it takes a lot of stamina in some cases. So I think our staff deserve a lot more. They're in bargaining right now and I hope they got what they asked for.

15:35
Now in terms of other innovations, I know DDA because while I work here, infant development was something that was, I mean, was DDA one of the premier organizations to realize that early intervention could make a difference? DDA was one of the few organizations in the world that realized that infants needed extra support.

15:59
right from the get-go, that you have to work with what you've got and work with families so that they could support their child in a way that was going to maximize that child's development. And at the time, the people had no idea how successful it would be. In those days, we didn't know that those were actually the most important years for brain development. So I look at kids today.

16:29
and by kids I mean young adults, and it's a completely different story than it was when I first started. When I first started, people had no access to IDP, they had no access to inclusive child care, which again DDA was involved in. They had no limited access to inclusive education. That really only came along after. So if they were lucky, they were...

16:57
registered in an inclusive school, most people were in the institutions. So the image of someone with a developmental disability was someone who had far greater needs than they do today. And the key, I think, has been infant development, which, you know, as Dana says in the documentary we made, there was just one book with, you know, a little bit of information in it.

17:21
And now there's just thousands of journal articles, there's research in universities, and it's just been spectacular. And the other thing is, is that it's had a benefit for early infant development of kids who don't have disabilities, because you can apply the same principles and help to enrich any child's environment so that they're going to learn and maximize their curiosity and what they know about.

17:51
It's just these days it just kind of seems like common sense. Exactly. It's like so many things today that we take for granted. People don't understand how much work it was and how much risk people took along the way to try to promote such ideas because they weren't necessarily welcome in the broader community. I mean as Dana says, the medical profession was very difficult to deal with originally because of course...

18:15
to them a developmental disability was a medical issue and now of course we see it as a social issue. Of course it's a medical issue in some cases but also it's a social and communication is really important certainly through inclusive education. People are far better communicators now than they were back in the day.

18:39
Of course, my big thing at DDA, which I think is very innovative, is all of the technology that we brought in. DDA is a very computerized organization. We have, you know, our whole...

18:53
organizational infrastructures based on computers. But we also have a lot of computers out that are used by the people that we support. And what's really exciting to me is seeing the work that our assistive technology department is doing in terms of supporting people with a whole range of diverse needs to maximize their development. And when you think about it, computers are memory.

19:22
So they provide added memory for all of us and processing speed. So those are two things anybody with a neurological disability needs more of memory and processing speed. So I think there's still a ton of, of, of possibilities in the future for using assistive technology to augment people who have maybe diminished brain function. Certainly the Alzheimer's community.

19:52
you know even though it's degenerative I think there's lots of ways that we could start studying how iPad use and other program use around communications and and so on uh... can help I mean we all use computers every day I know that they help me and they help me with my memory that's for sure set that reminder yes exactly so you know why not everybody

20:19
Now for the listeners, Alana mentioned a woman by the name of Dana. Now that's Dana Brinnelson. She was sort of at the forefront of our infant development program back in, I guess, the 70s, I guess that would have been. And Alana also mentioned this documentary. So I'll just mention that right now is that this year we, to help celebrate our 70th anniversary, our videographer David Osear created a documentary called Doing the Impossible, the story of the Developmental Disabilities Association.

20:49
that is available to be seen on our website you have to go to www.develop.bc.ca it's there, it's available on our YouTube channel as well very very much worth the watch and a very very excellent job by our videographer

21:05
So, moving on a little bit now, also talking about in that documentary a lot is how we got rid of institutions in BC. What role did you play in that? I was really lucky because I worked at San Diego House Society during the downsizing and the board at San Diego House was very anxious to support the downsizing. So, if you can imagine, you would go into the institution

21:32
and the social workers there would group people into groups of four because at that time the optimal residential size was determined to be four. So the social workers would group people into groups of four and generally it was people who knew each other in the institution or maybe had similar sort of behaviors or disorders or whatever. So I would go out and get to go and meet them and then plan.

22:02
their lives in the community. So that meant buying a house and turning it into a group home. It meant hiring up a bunch of staff. In those days, they made $8.50 an hour, so it was extremely difficult to recruit. And it was sort of a new job because there were community living positions, but only in the existing community associations, which weren't very many in those days. So,

22:32
I felt like Martin Luther King. You know, you go in, you buy a house, you bring the folks out. We had to stagger, you know, generally for them to get used to it. You know, they'd go to the institutions, we'd pick them up and bring them home. We took people shopping so that they could pick out their own furniture. And then the challenge was building community capacity around folks. So...

22:58
you know, think about a lot of things, but doctors, we had to get doctors for everybody, and the doctors in the community in those days didn't know anything about people with developmental disabilities, because they'd always just been in the institutions. Getting dentists, getting mental health support, none of that existed in those days, so we had to work with...

23:19
allied professionals to build that capacity and unfortunately some of that has worn away over the years in the sense that psychiatrists for example are extremely hard to get for anybody these days. I think there's a two to four year wait or something like that. So it's always been a challenge. And then of course at that time people weren't necessarily accepted in the community because they were.

23:49
isolated from the community and institutions for so long. So there was a lot of community development that had to be done just with your local neighborhood bakery and your save on foods and just the regular places in community where people go on a day-to-day basis. We also.

24:10
we're working with a bunch of folks who'd never really had any fun before. So we had great times taking them out and going to movies. There was one fellow who came out of an institution and he was in a wheelchair. And we had one staff that was extremely creative and decided that he had never really experienced freedom before so he took them ultra light flying.

24:34
And you know people... There has to be some video of that somewhere. Well there wasn't, but because they didn't, we didn't have video cameras in those days. But it was so much fun. And I think that was the most rewarding part is seeing folks come out of the institution and just blossom. And for the first time in their lives, make choices and decisions about themselves.

24:59
That was going to be my next question. What was that like witnessing that sort of transformation? It was extremely rewarding. Extremely rewarding. And in some cases, you know, people came out of the institution with a list of medications as long as your arm. So sometimes just taking people off of this medication helped because then you could see who the real person was underneath all that and hopefully get better treatment for them in the community.

25:29
I guess particularly in BC now, because we know there are still some institutions in Canada, how much better are we and how much further do we need to go?

25:41
Well, I'm a bad person to ask about how much further do we have to go and what better can we be because I always think that there's more that can be done and we could develop and deliver better services. We could create more independence so that people can live. You know, as long as you are dependent on others to live, you are not necessarily free.

26:11
because you're dependent. And...

26:14
some of the folks that we support have been dependent either on their families or on special education assistance in their school or on the government and the more you're dependent on others the less opportunity you have to make the decisions and choices you want to make around yourself and that's everybody that's not just person with people with disabilities.

26:44
My goal has always been to help people become independent because the more independent they are the less they need to rely on other people and the more they can be free. I want to go back and talk a little bit about Be Pretty again. She was a woman who was so proud of her family. She was so proud of her son John. She was so proud of Bob because even though he did have Down syndrome he succeeded in the community and lived a great life.

27:14
And she was so proud of her grandchildren. So she was an extremely family-oriented woman, which is why I think she spent so many of her years in early motherhood advocating for the kinds of community supports that Bob would need in particular. And she once said, I knew the world would not adjust for Bob.

27:43
So that meant Bob and I had to adjust for the world. And I think that was profoundly wise. Because people in today's world, I mean, are even, you know, they're far more expressive, I guess, is the word I would use. I mean, people.

28:08
in the old days had a certain sense of manners and there was no Facebook or social media that you would put everybody down on. People were nice. So generally people were nicer, but they still stigmatized folks with developmental disabilities. And in today's world, I think there's less stigma. I think there's more inclusion.

28:34
you can have inclusion unless you have accessibility and so for people in wheelchairs or people with uh... challenges around vision or hearing uh... we still don't have a totally accessible community all you have to do is you know ask people and they'll tell you that there's a lot of places they can't go

28:57
I've got a friend with a wheelchair and we were out at a show last Friday. We knew we could come in the front door, but there was only one way out the back and that involved stairs. Right, and that's if there's not a fire. Yeah. Right? So a lot of apartment buildings aren't necessarily accessible when you think about having to evacuate really quickly and you're on your own and you're in a wheelchair. So I won't be happy until we have...

29:26
an accessible, fully inclusive world, and the way to do that is through universal design, basically. And I think a lot of municipalities have caught on to that, and so they are starting to reflect it in their building codes. The city of Vancouver right now has an accessibility plan, so I'm really thrilled about that. And I just hope that the reality reflects our aspirations.

29:53
We're getting there. I think it's on a good path. Now, if you could send a message to everyone in Canada about disability inclusion and support, what would that be? It would be that it could be you.

30:07
All of us, at some point in our lives, experience disabilities. Even if you've just gone into surgery and are home and you're recuperating, you're in a position where you're dependent on others and might have challenges getting out of the house if there's a fire or whatever. So, and certainly as I get older, I realize what some of the disabilities are that come with aging. And...

30:36
you know, I'm quite fit still, but if I, if my arthritis and my hips acts up much more then, you know, I could end up in a wheelchair when I'm older. So you know, a lot of people lose their eyesight as they age, a lot of people lose their hearing. So over time all of us have issues around accessibility and inclusion. And

31:01
That's why I advocate inclusion, because it really affects all of us. It's not just about people with developmental disabilities or disabilities. It's about all of us and our safety and our well-being and our health. And I also think it's really important for all of us to get to know people who aren't like us. Because otherwise we get into these echo chambers and these small little groups.

31:30
and that's all we hear and those are the only people we see instead of sort of broadening our horizons to meet all sorts of different people because everyone has something to contribute. Absolutely. Do you have anything else to add on our 70th anniversary? Well, I would just like to say that 70 years at DDA means we've had 70 years of employees.

31:54
and our employees have actually gone on to work as physicians, physiotherapists, speech and language therapists. They've gone on. Some are probably actors. I mean, all sorts of people have worked at DDA and felt that it was extremely rewarding, and a lot of people have made it a career. So I would just like to thank all of the staff that we've had over

32:24
this fantastic position where we're in now, where people are more and more included in everyday life, people are becoming more and more independent, and there's more and more tools available for all of us to reach our full potential. I think that wraps it up.

32:42
Sounds good.

33:12
Association. It's a fantastic piece of work put together by our filmmaker David Poorsier and it's really worth checking out. Bye for now.