LiveWorkPlay Receives Social Media Award: Community Living Ontario 61st Annual Conference, September 25, 2014

LiveWorkPlay was recognized with the Community Living Ontario Social Media Award on the occasion of their 61st Annual Conference Celebration Dinner and Awards Ceremony on September 25, 2014. The text from the award presentation and acceptance speech are provided below.

LiveWorkPlay also contributed to the conference through a well-attended shared presentation Using Emerging Technology to Enable Person-Directed Support with Julie Malette, Wayne Mills, and Clem Pelot from Helen Sanderson Associates Canada, Adagio Integrated, and Mills Community Support Corporation.

Doug Cooper: Presentation of the Social Media Award,
Community Living Ontario Annual Conference 2014

Designed to encourage and recognize excellence in the use of social media by a local association, the criteria include: audience reach, dynamism, design, functionality, accessibility, interactivity, and brand consistency.

The Community Living Ontario Social Media Award is presented each year to one of our more than 100 organizations. The winning organization understands the underlying importance of social media in raising public awareness.

This organization has gone above and beyond with their social media strategy in numerous ways: interacting and responding to the public, engaging important current issues, and creatively addressing topics that are important to each and every one of us.

This year’s Social Media Award recipient is LiveWorkPlay!

Accepting the award for LiveWorkPlay: Keenan Wellar, Co-Leader & Director of Communications, who oversees multiple social media channels including Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.

Keenan Wellar: Acceptance Speech

I want to first thank the people who made this possible, mainly, our members: people with intellectual disabilities who have allowed us into their lives to share their stories, as well as families and community partners such as employers, who have allowed us into their workplaces. Hundreds of videos and thousands of photos shared through our social media channels have allowed us to share our vision of a more welcoming and inclusive community.

I want to thank our dedicated staff team and our more than 100 volunteers who are often responsible for alerting me to the stories that give life to our social media channels.

For those of you in the audience that may be involved with agencies that remain resistant to using social media, please help those with the ability to change that situation understand that it is part of our responsibility as individual organizations and as a movement to champion our values to others, and conduits like Facebook and Twitter can help us amplify that message.

Social media will never replace interpersonal relationships. But I think back to last night and having the privilege to be in the room to see Orville Endicott celebrated for a remarkable career spanning more than three decades. There should be a lot more people who know about Orville and his work with Community Living at the local, national, and international levels to champion the rights of people with intellectual disabilities. We should be sharing this with the world.

In conclusion, I believe you will find that organizations like LiveWorkPlay and people like myself who have the privilege of developing and implementing social media strategies are by nature prepared to share what we know with others. This is particularly true when the outcome will be contributions towards a better world for people with intellectual disabilities and stronger communities for all.

Thank you again for this wonderful award.