South Vancouver Neighbourhood House Annual General Meeting

September Calendar for South ADC

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September Calendar for Beulah ADC

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Celebrating Italian Culture

During the month of August, Min Yan Qiu, a program worker the Adult Day Centre at Beulah Gardens organized a two week program series celebrating the heritage of our participants from Italian backgrounds. The staff facilitated a variety of activities, including a visit to the museum at the Vancouver Italian Cultural Centre and lunch on Commerical Drive, a Home Towns program, Italian show and tell, mask making, Italian music, history of gelato, a tomato quiz, making tiramisu and an Italian dance party. This series of programs was so positive that we wanted to highlight them here on our blog, so I sat down with Min Yan to ask her some questions about the program series.

      What was the inspiration behind the cultural celebration?

Our centre is multicultural and we often facilitate programs that promote cross-cultural sharing. This year, one of my goals was to highlight the cultures that are represented here and a large number of our participants come from an Italian background. In conversations with these seniors, I learned that summer is an important time for them; it’s a time to spend with family, gardening and harvesting fruit, spending time on the beach, eating seafood and traveling, so I was inspired to organize a summer celebration of Italian culture.

Lunch at Lombardo's

What was your vision for the program?

Overall, I wanted to promote the understanding of Italian culture for all of our participants and to learn more about the Italian philosophy of strong family values. For the participants from Italian backgrounds, I was hoping to facilitate opportunities for them to share their histories and memories and to connect with what is important to them. In the planning stages, a very important theme that emerged was the importance of where people come from. I realized that many of these participants hadn’t been “home” in a long time and this became a source of inspiration for many of the programs.

Map of Home Towns 

Where did you get your ideas?
The ideas for the programs came from our participants. Not knowing a lot about Italian culture myself, I started out by asking all of our participants the question, “If you went to Italy, what would you want to see?” There were a variety of answers; some wanted to taste the food, some wanted to visit the towns and others wanted to see the local crafts. Using their responses, I was able to plan a variety and range of activities that incorporated their interests. It was also important to me that the participants could act as facilitators, so I took their feedback and planned activities where they could take this role.

What were the highlights?
Initially, I thought that the show and tell would be the most exciting program and it was really fun. People brought items from Italy and spent time talking about their uses, historical significance or sentimental value; one participant brought an Italian coffee pot and showed us how to use it, which was a really fun experience. 

Italian Show and Tell

Our trip to the Italian Cultural Centre was also a great experience. We had an excellent guide there who talked about Italian History in Vancouver and explained the exhibits. 

Il Museo At The Italian Cultural Centre

For me, however, the most pleasant surprise was the success of the Home Towns program. For this program, we identified the home towns of each participant who came from Italy and represented them on a map which we displayed and discussed with the group. We then researched each area and created posters containing pictures and information which we framed and used to decorate the centre. 

Home Town Posters and Masks

Finally, we complied all of the information and images from the posters into a slideshow, which we presented to the participants. In an adult day program setting, presentation type programs tend to be more observatory, but I wanted to facilitate a more interactive  experience and take the position of a learner, rather than a teacher. To accomplish this, as I presented the images, I asked the participants to describe them. People were so excited that they couldn't stop talking; some even went up to the screen to point things out and told stories about their home towns, generating some very interesting conversations. I was really excited about this level of interaction and could see that the  participants enjoyed sharing their memories. 

What's next? 

We'll continue to highlight the cultures of our participants this year with special events,

focusing on Chinese, South Asian, Japanese and Canadian cultures. We gathered valuable experience from facilitating the Italian cultural series and saw how meaningful it was for our participants to connect with the past, to share in the present and to celebrate their culture. For future events, we'd like to invite family members to join us.