L’Arche Canada Foundation

Background

The L’Arche movement was started in France in 1964 by the well-known Canadian theologian and scholar Jean Vanier. It is now international, with 120 communities on five continents, 27 of them in Canada. In these communities, young volunteer assistants live in homes with, and serve, people with intellectual disabilities for periods ranging from several months to two years or more.

The L’Arche Canada Foundation was created in 2001 to strengthen the organization through fundraising and to make its benefits more widely available to Canadians through programs aimed at extending L’Arche values into the wider society. These values include sharing life together (the abled and the disabled) in a spirit of mutuality, and enabling residents to grow to their full potential as citizens.

Full Description

This project is one of the Applied Dissemination projects supported by the Foundation.

The Foundations grant is helping the L’Arche Canada Foundation to build a stronger role and increase its fundraising capacity in order to better serve existing and new L’Arche communities across the country with local fundraising, volunteer recruitment, and communications, while testing different approaches to serving people with disabilities. The grant is also assisting L’Arche to disseminate its core values of inclusion to Canadian society at large.

L’Arche will support the development of five new L’Arche communities in Canada. Five existing communities will expand their services to people with disabilities. As resources permit, L’Arche communities will test new applications of their model, such as partnership programs with families who have a relative with a disability who is not in a L’Arche home.