How do you find out what’s happening in your community?
For people with developmental disabilities and their families, finding inclusive and accessible opportunities can sometimes mean searching across different websites, organizations and social media accounts.
That’s a challenge the Belonging Collective has been working together to address.
The Belonging Collective brings together organizations in Waterloo Region with a shared interest in creating more opportunities for inclusion, connection and belonging for people with disabilities. As part of that work, several members currently contribute to a shared Community Calendar, including KW Habilitation, Developmental Services Ontario, Extend-A-Family Waterloo Region, Independent Living Waterloo Region, Sunbeam, Our Studio and Waterloo Region Family Network.
The calendar helps people discover inclusive public events, programs and opportunities to connect across Waterloo Region.
But what if we could make finding those opportunities even easier?
Taking the Challenge to Blueprint
This summer, KW Habilitation brought that question to the University of Waterloo Blueprint Impact-A-Thon:
How might we create a single, accessible place where people with disabilities can independently discover meaningful opportunities to connect with their communities?
Blueprint is a student-run University of Waterloo organization that brings together designers, developers and product managers to create technology for social good.
During the Impact-A-Thon, 11 teams of students spent the day exploring our challenge and developing possible solutions. At the end of the event, representatives from KW Habilitation, including a person with lived experience, reviewed the ideas and selected a winning concept.
But that was only the beginning.
Turning the Idea Into Something Real
Since the Impact-A-Thon, we’ve continued working directly with the winning Blueprint team to turn their idea into a real community resource.
Throughout the summer, the team has met regularly with KW Habilitation and with people with disabilities to develop and test prototypes, hear what works and what doesn’t, and use that feedback to shape the next version.
The idea builds on what we’ve learned from the Belonging Collective’s existing Community Calendar, with a bigger vision for what could come next: a highly visual, easy-to-use platform designed with people with disabilities, rather than simply for them.
The goal is to make it easier for people to independently discover community events, recreation, volunteer opportunities and other ways to get involved in the things that interest them.
A Resource for Our Community
This isn’t intended to become a KW Habilitation calendar.
The bigger vision is to create a tool that the Belonging Collective can use together, allowing organizations across our community to continue sharing opportunities while making them easier for people to find and explore in one place.
It’s a great example of what can happen when different perspectives and skills come together. Blueprint brings technology, design and fresh ideas. Community organizations bring knowledge and experience. And people with lived experience are helping shape the platform throughout its development, so we’re not making assumptions about what an accessible and useful tool should look like.
There’s still work ahead, but what started as a one-day challenge is becoming an ongoing partnership, and we’re excited to see where it takes us.