Building
Momentum

Surrey Place had an impressive year growing its online community through social media and email marketing. During the 2019/20 fiscal year, Surrey Place reinvigorating its existing social media channels, Twitter and LinkedIn, and launched on two new platforms – Facebook and Instagram. As of March 31, 2020, these two platforms have an online following of 2,500 and 325, respectively. Our new social media strategy contributed to a higher level of engagement on posts, through likes, comments and shares than previous years – which expanded Surrey Place’s reach and helped to build an online space for clients, families, caregivers and the broader community to stay informed. We also launched a new email marketing strategy to help to maintain existing relationships with clients and cultivate new ones. For those who want to keep up to date on new programs and services and updates from across the organization, our email campaigns have been among the best avenues.

Internal communications was also a focus area for Surrey Place in 2019/20. We launched a new internal communications tool, Microsoft Teams, to help keep staff from across the organization empowered and informed. Surrey Place has over 450 employees across various disciplines and multiple locations in the Greater Toronto Area. To foster a greater sense of community and share knowledge and information, we directed more attention to our executive communications by including a message from the CEO in each monthly internal newsletter. With excellent feedback from our staff on our new initiatives, we will continue to invest in our internal communications.

In 2019/20, we were the successful recipient of eight grant proposals, totalling $390,000 in revenue. Notably, Autism Services received a $30,000 grant from the Ben and Hilda Katz Charitable Foundation to address a gap in job-ready skills taught to people with autism. The Autism Volunteering & Mentorship Training Program is a pilot designed to help teens with autism develop skills to seek, apply and succeed in volunteer placements in preparation for employment. The pilot program will engage 12 young students with autism in mentorship and skill development for employment readiness.

Wellness Services received a Maple Leafs Sports & Entertainment Community Action grant for $20,000 to launch Breathe & Blossom, a mindfulness and yoga program for children and youth with intellectual and developmental disabilities, autism, and fetal alcohol spectrum disorder. This program uses innovative modifications to mindfulness and traditional yoga to accommodate individuals of all abilities, including participants that are non-verbal or have mobility issues. Learning mindfulness and modified yoga in this social, enriching and safe environment reinforces the idea that exercise and mindfulness can be fun and stress-free.

We also received over $30,000 in funding from the Canada Summer Jobs Program to provide paid opportunities for youth between the ages of 15 and 30 to develop. This funding will create seven part-time positions in 2020/21 and support the delivery of our programs in social services, medical services, fundraising, communications and administration.

Developmental disabilities content is often missing from the undergraduate medical curriculum. Surrey Place, together with the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Toronto (U of T), worked to create expert-led content. One of our initiatives, now in its third year, ensures that first-year undergraduate medical students at U of T are exposed to people with IDD by having each student visit a community agency to meet and discuss health care and other issues with clients and staff. On February 4 and 11, 2020, developmental agencies across the Greater Toronto Area hosted 268 students from the University of Toronto Mississauga and St. George campuses. Following the visits, 79 per cent of respondents felt better prepared to work with patients with IDD.

In Ontario, women with developmental disabilities have lower screening rates for cervical and breast cancer compared to other women. There is a clear need for education about the importance of cancer screening in this population and adapted educational materials for this education to succeed. Surrey Place worked across departments to develop four narrated booklets on specific topics related to women’s reproductive health. The video booklets ‘Pap Test’ and ‘Healthy Breasts’ launched on the Surrey Place YouTube channel in August 2019 and were screened to clinicians at the Conference of the International Association for the Scientific Study of Intellectual Disabilities in Glasgow that month. Initial feedback from clinicians, researchers, and other conference attendees was very positive. The production and dissemination of the two remaining booklets, and evaluation of the entire collection, are currently underway.

Individualized Funding (IF), often referred to as Direct Funding in Ontario, is money provided to people to purchase supports and services. This type of funding, like Special Services at Home, and Passport, is designed to give people more choice and control in the supports and services they use, but research shows that people often have difficulties using this money and sometimes go unspent. In 2019, Surrey Place launched the IF Library to help address this issue. The IF Library, supported by a grant from the Ministry of Children, Community and Social Services, provides centralized access to information, resources, and tools and facilitates long-term planning to use their funding effectively. The content was developed over two years by working with adults with developmental disabilities, their families, support networks, and developmental service agencies in Ontario to identify the best practices and resources. In a recent feedback survey, 71 per cent of respondents found the IF Library useful, and 80 per cent indicated they would revisit the website. We continue towards making the IF Library more accessible and user friendly.