A new project, focused on supporting employees who juggle work and caregiving responsibilities, launches on May 6, 2010 in Charlottetown. The project entitled, “Winning Strategies to Support Caregivers in the Workplace”, will be announced at the project’s first event, “Caring Coast to Coast”.  The event will be held at Confederation Centre of the Arts in Studio 1 from 9:00 a.m. – 1:00 p.m. and will be opened by Verna Bruce, Past Associate Deputy Minister of Veteran Affairs Canada and recipient of the 2008 PEI  Lieutenant Governor's Award for Excellence in Public Administration.  The half day session will be held in an “open space” format allowing opportunities for participants to engage in open dialogue about the realities of managing the issues related to work and caregiving.

Last month, President Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama hosted the White House Forum on Workplace Flexibility .  Using the perspective of not only supporting employees who have caregiving responsibilities outside of work but one of economic necessity, our neighbours to the south have placed a national priority around creating more flexibility within workplaces. John Berry, Director of Personnel Management for the federal government, said, “Flexibility is the new email.  There are those employers that have it, and there are those that will.”  The time has come to understand and address the realities of employees who are stressed and overloaded. The Canadian Caregiver Coalition estimates that 4-5 million Canadians struggle to balance work and caregiving for a family member who is in need of support because of age, disabling medical condition, chronic injury, long term illness or disability. “Winning Strategies to Support Caregivers in the Workplace” will view these issues through both an economic and humanitarian lens. When employees and employers work together to resolve work and life issues, there are significant improvements to customer satisfaction, employee engagement and the bottom line.

Project Coordinator, Jane Boyd, couldn’t be more pleased with the team she has put in place for this project. She states that, “Collectively, our team has over 50 years of experience related to work life issues traversing across family, childcare, eldercare, health and human resources.”  Boyd has been actively involved in the early learning field and family related policy on the Island since 2007.  She is particularly pleased to have Rob Paterson, a leading advisor on social networks and on how human culture operates, serving as a project advisor. Based in PEI, his work flows between organizational design, research and the web 2.0 world. Paterson is pleased to be involved in this innovative project. He says, “The stage is set to utilize social networks and technology in gaining a national perspective around the issues and solutions for Canadian’s juggling work and caregiving responsibilities.” Paterson goes on to state, “Our hope is that we engage the hearts and minds of employers and employees as we venture on this journey of discovery. This journey will encompass the value of social media, collaborative stories and action.” In addition, the project's research partner, University of Guelph’s Centre for Families Work and Wellbeing, will be pivotal in ensuring that the discoveries are solid and useful in creating a less stressful experience for Canadian’s who provide care while employed. The Centre for Families Work and Wellbeing has already conducted extensive research in this area. In addition, they are very familiar with international best practice around this issue.

Members of the Project Team Include:

Jane Boyd – Project Co-ordinator

Dr. Carol Matusicky – Engagement Co-ordinator

   Wendy Creelman – Marketing Co-ordinator

   Robert Paterson – Social Media Advisor

Funded in part by the Government of Canada’s Social Development Partnerships Program, this three year project will aim to support employers in becoming best practice employers around the dual roles faced by many Canadian’s. By engaging employers, employees and service providers, the hope is that the resulting conversation will create innovative workplace supports, tools and resources that will assist employees who face the dual role of work and caring for their children, elders and other family members.

To
register or for more information, please e-mail
caringcoasttocoast@gmail.com by May 3, 2010. Space is limited.  You can also learn more at our Caring Coast to Coast Facebook Page.

I have long suspected the traditional school model was not going to be the way of the future. How we live, learn, work and play is changing as we blog, write and speak. With so many things shifting in our communities, governments, businesses and economy it is clear that life as we know it will not remain the same.  I don't think it is all doom and gloom; but I do think that the world as we know it is changing in significant ways.  A project that I am currently working on is really showing me this. (More on that soon…) We are in the perfect storm….more and more we need to work together to understand what it all means. We need to be prepared to ride the demographic, economic and societal change wave that is coming.  What are you doing in your business, community and family?  What does living in the State of Now mean in relation to all of this? 

Via Rob is this article from Time.com

Rather than warehouse their children in factory schools invented to instill obedience in the future mill workers of America, bourgeois rebels will educate their kids in virtual schools tailored to different learning styles. Whereas only 1.5 million children were homeschooled in 2007, we can expect the number to explode in future years as distance education blows past the traditional variety in cost and quality.
The cultural battle lines of our time, with red America pitted against blue, will be scrambled as Buddhist vegan militia members and evangelical anarchist squatters trade tips on how to build self-sufficient vertical farms from scrap-heap materials. To avoid the tax man, dozens if not hundreds of strongly encrypted digital currencies and barter schemes will crop up, leaving an underresourced IRS to play whack-a-mole with savvy libertarian "hacktivists."

Work and life will be remixed, as old-style jobs, with long commutes and long hours spent staring at blinking computer screens, vanish thanks to ever increasing productivity levels. New jobs that we can scarcely imagine will take their place, only they'll tend to be home-based, thus restoring life to bedroom suburbs that today are ghost towns from 9 to 5. Private homes will increasingly give way to cohousing communities, in which singles and nuclear families will build makeshift kinship networks in shared kitchens and common areas and on neighborhood-watch duty. Gated communities will grow larger and more elaborate, effectively seceding from their municipalities and pursuing their own visions of the good life. Whether this future sounds like a nightmare or a dream come true, it's coming.

This transformation will be not so much political as antipolitical. The decision to turn away from broken and brittle institutions, like conventional schools and conventional jobs, will represent a turn toward what military theorist John Robb calls "resilient communities," which aspire to self-sufficiency and independence. The left will return to its roots as the champion of mutual aid, cooperative living and what you might call "broadband socialism," in which local governments take on the task of building high-tech infrastructure owned by the entire community. Assuming today's libertarian revival endures, it's easy to imagine the right defending the prerogatives of state and local governments and also of private citizens — including the weird ones. This new individualism on the left and the right will begin in the spirit of cynicism and distrust that we see now, the sense that we as a society are incapable of solving pressing problems. It will evolve into a new confidence that citizens working in common can change their lives and in doing so can change the world around them.

We see this individualism in the rise of "freeganism" and in the small but growing handful of "cage-free families" who've abandoned their suburban idylls for life on the open road. We also see it in the rising number of high school seniors who take a gap year before college. While the higher-education industry continues to agitate for college for all, many young adults are stubbornly resistant, perhaps because they recognize that for a lot of them, college is an overpriced status marker and little else. In the wake of the downturn, household formation has slowed down. More than one-third of workers under 35 live with their parents.

The hope is that these young people will eventually leave the house when the economy perks up, and doubtless many will. Others, however, will choose to root themselves in their neighborhoods and use social media to create relationships that sustain them as they craft alternatives to the rat race. Somewhere in the suburbs there is an unemployed 23-year-old who is plotting a cultural insurrection, one that will resonate with existing demographic, cultural and economic trends so powerfully that it will knock American society off its axis.

Salam is a policy adviser at the nonpartisan think tank e21, a blogger for the National Review and a columnist for Forbes.com

via www.time.com