The Kamloops Self Advocate Newsletter
Who We Are
Our mission and vision: We promote Community Inclusion, including ideas like social justice, social inclusion, kindness and compassion, anti-bullying, mental health issues and all disabilities. We promote success stories about the challenges that many face. Instead of focusing on a label, we like to refer to the idea of diverse abilities. We promote entertainment, lifestyle issues, and community events. We also promote the idea of reducing stigma and discrimination, preferring to stomp it out completely.
Our goal is to spread awareness about what we can do, not what we can’t do. We highlight different themes in the newsletter and include ideas about different topics every month. Recreation and leisure are important to us, as well as social issues that affect our diverse communities, including Indigenous people as well as the LGBTQ2+ community. We also promote different causes and things happening in the disability field.
We have a great team of contributors with lived experience and different challenges writing for us. We cover issues that interest everyone whether they have challenges or not.
Why We Are Involved
I believe it’s important to stomp out stigma and discrimination. The general public needs to know people, with diverse abilities, we have more abilities that can contribute greatly to the community. We have more abilities than disabilities; therefore we are a great asset to our community as a whole. Others will greatly benefit when we are inclusive within society.
It matters because spreading awareness in printed form like I am doing with the newsletter spreads awareness to many people. I have the newsletter online to spread the importance of having an inclusive society. People all over the world read my message about the importance of inclusion.
We have been in business since September of 2013. We support people with diverse abilities by sharing their success stories. Most of our contributors have challenges. They all tell their stories in a positive light. Our contributors of the newsletter get paid for their stories so I am creating jobs for those who have challenges in getting a job. I, myself, couldn’t get a job in the disability field like I wanted, so I started my own business running the newsletter.
When people read the newsletter, they can see the abilities we have. It’s important to us for people to see us as a person rather than just seeing the wheelchair, for instance.
We think being socially inclusive and having inclusive employment is wonderful because everyone deserves a job and deserves to have self worth.
Accessibility Initiatives
Just that we promote hiring those with challenges. I have a blind contributor as well as ones in wheelchairs. Some have mental challenges like me, yet I can still run the newsletter independently.
