While entering our photo contest last month, Community Rehabilitation Counsellor with Community Brain Injury Services, Julie Austin truly captured what it means to practice living our Mission. “My primary role as a community counsellor is to help my client’s succeed in the roles and goals they create for themselves. I have helped many in my 10 years with Providence Care, and I have had the pleasure of working with some who set high standards and cannot stop until they have achieved them” Read her entry below about her agency’s garden and how it helped her clients.
You ask your contestants to best choose where their photo might showcase the views reflected in our new hospital. The themes of Heritage, Lakeview and Parkside personify our beautiful city and I experience these elements each day as I perform my role as a Community Rehabilitation Counsellor with Community Brain Injury Services. I travel in the community to assist and advocate for the people I serve. I prepare meals in our downtown community office with my weekly group of brain injury survivors, surrounded by limestone and the faint chime of City Hall’s grand clock.
My primary role as a community counsellor is to help my client’s succeed in the roles and goals they create for themselves. I have helped many in my 10 years with Providence Care, and I have had the pleasure of working with some who set high standards and cannot stop until they have achieved them. This year, our agency took on a community plot at the Oak Street Community Garden. It was a chance to engage our clients in a social productive activity that offers a variety of opportunities to learn about local food initiatives, cleaner eating and to emphasize the importance of being outside. This effort was taken on solely by one of my outreach clients, who made a commitment to himself after his injury to eat better, take better care of himself and involve being outside and ‘in the dirt’ as part of his path through recovery. This garden was a chance for us to learn about making and maintaining a viable vegetable garden.
In wishing to support my client in his desire to create a vegetable plot on the grounds of the new hospital, I have been using my time and connections within our services to see if this wish could become a reality. I do not think my photo best reflects any of these current vistas, but would be a shining example of perhaps a ‘Gardenside’ view should Providence Care consider a small allotment of space within the new grounds to be available and accessible to inpatients during their stay. I am reaching out via this creative platform to ‘plant a seed’ of consideration to the planners of our new facility. Having the chance to collaborate with staff, patients and volunteers to help provide connections to the earth and to our plates would be a bright and bold move for all involved.
Leave a Reply