- Client: Island Expeditions
http://www.katezimmerman.ca/writing/travel/IslandExpeditionsBelize.pdf
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Client: Toolbox/Oakridge Centre
https://issuu.com/toolboxdesign/docs/oak_theedition_digitalpages
- Client: VANOC; report researched and written over several years about legacies of North American Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games
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Client: Vancouver Aquarium
DO LIKE THE BLOWFISH AND PUCKER UP
Vancouver, B.C. – Is it getting hot in here, or did Aquarium veterinary fellow Dr. Megan Strobel just broach the subject of coral sex?
Make February 14, 2019 a Valentine’s night to remember with a warm, deep dive into otter lovemaking techniques and much, much more, after dark at the Vancouver Aquarium.
Paired-up folk, this is the night to leave your kids at home. Drink in one hand, lover in the other, wander our galleries and explore the predilections of aquatic paramours.
As a lover, is an octopus all over the place? Would a human be capable of seahorsing around? If you feel you’d do better between the barnacles than these expert procreators, do whisper the details to your partner … and not Aquarium staff.
Whether you arrive with your lifelong flame or hope to leave with new one, our galleries will stimulate your imagination with arousing, alluring and amusing stories about sex and the single sea creature. Our naughty puppet show will definitely break the ice. A mix-and-mingle with our stylish penguins will get everybody cooing. The capper? You’ll learn everything you ever wanted to know about hot shark-on-shark action.
This year, you don’t need the Kama Sutra to open your mind. Our intimate, adult affair offers cocktails, beer and wine for purchase throughout the Aquarium. There’s no additional charge for the adventurous ideas you may get on the way home.
Where: Vancouver Aquarium (845 Avison Way)
When: February 14 from 6 to 10 p.m.
What: Adults-only access to Vancouver Aquarium, including the Wet Lab, all galleries, the 4-D theatre, and Discover Rays. Food, wine, and beer will be available for purchase.
Tickets are only available online at vanaqua.org/afterhours. Guests are encouraged to purchase tickets early as this event sells out. Tickets are $27 for members and $35 for non-members.
After Hours is a 19+ event. Photo ID is required for entry. All ticket sales are final. Membership cards will be required for member-priced ticket holders.
Vancouver Aquarium
Vancouver Aquarium, an Ocean Wise initiative, is one of the world’s leading accredited aquariums, dedicated to the conservation of aquatic life. www.vanaqua.org -
Client: BC Cancer Agency's Forward magazine, for cancer survivors; I've removed the patients' last names for privacy purposes.
CancerChatCanada helps patients, survivors and caregivers unload their burdens
Jim L.’s wife, Susan, had cancer for 28 years. For much of that time, she didn’t want to talk about it.
“When you’re a caregiver, there’s a great feeling of loneliness,” says L., now 71, from his Chilliwack home. He and his wife had no core of familial support. “Every five years, Susan would get a setback in her cancer, and I just had nobody to talk to, really.”
In 2009, L. found himself near the end of his tether. He signed up for one of the pilot projects for an online chat room for cancer patients and their caregivers, which turned out to be a godsend. “It was just a big, big relief for me.”
L. joined a group of nine other caregivers, led by a facilitator, for weekly 90-minute chats conducted by text on an encrypted website from the privacy of their own homes. He says the chat room gave him the strength to carry on.
“It was just so brilliantly set up. I really can’t put into words how helpful it was.”
CancerChatCanada was officially launched in 2010. Participants sign up online and are assigned a group suitable to their needs.
“We’re creating the opportunity for patients, cancer survivors and caregivers, no matter where they live in Canada, to be able to access professionally led support,” says Dr. Joanne Stephen, who leads the program through the B.C. Cancer Agency in Vancouver. “There’s an incredible power and knowledge that comes from cancer patients, survivors and caregivers being able to get together with those who have walked that walk with them, and to share their experiences. It’s also very helpful to have psycho-social experts because they’ve got knowledge and skills that they can share and people can use to manage that emotional toll. They talk about coping strategies, communication skills, ways of managing anxiety.”
The chat room is hosted by the B.C. Cancer Agency in association with other cancer agencies across the country and the Canadian Partnership Against Cancer. It has about 10 active facilitators at present, five of them based in B.C.
More than 1,000 patients, survivors and caregivers have used the program so far, says Stephen, with five or six new groups launching every six weeks. Most groups consist of cancer patients or survivors with mixed diagnoses but each group’s members are assembled according to similarities in their cancers’ trajectory, degree of complexity and symptom burden.
CancerChatCanada is not for everyone dealing with cancer, Stephen acknowledges – 15-20 percent drop out. Of those who remain in the group for its 10-12-week duration, however, 80 percent describe themselves as satisfied or very satisfied.
For them, she says, “These chats are unexpectedly intimate. People feel the freedom to speak openly. They talk about fear of recurrence, they talk about sex, they talk about death. They talk about many of the things that they don’t have much opportunity to do elsewhere, sometimes because it’s a taboo topic. The privacy is very freeing.”
CancerChatCanada especially suits people who don’t have ready access to other support groups, like Ashley D., who lives in the town of Roberts Creek, on B.C.’s Sunshine Coast. At 28, D. joined the chat room a few months after completing her treatment for breast cancer, sharing her recovery with other breast cancer survivors under the age of 45.
“When you finish treatment, you’re thrown into this unknown space of uncertainty,” says the now-30-year-old D. “It’s almost like an identity crisis.”
Having contact online with other women who were experiencing similar anxieties and issues “normalized things for me,” she says, noting that some doctors compare the post-treatment mental state of cancer patients – especially young cancer patients -- to Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).
It was a welcome outlet for D., who felt reassured to know that every week she’d be able to bring up her current concerns.
The anonymity of the situation also meant D. didn’t have to “become too invested” in her fellow survivors while dealing with her own recovery. Independent of the chat room, D. administers a private support group page on Facebook for young breast cancer survivors whom she knows; it sometimes attracts comments so raw that she finds them unbearably painful.
“I think post-treatment is almost harder than being in treatment, because everything emotional catches up to you.”
Meanwhile, cancer patients’ caregivers have their own issues, including concern about the patient’s physical and emotional state, fear of losing their loved one, and financial challenges. Jim L. was buoyed by a community of people dealing with similar worries and frustrations.
“I was able to get in touch with my inner feelings and share them, feelings that had been bottled up for years,” he says. “Sometimes I’d be in tears.”
He started to share the stories he heard in the chat room with his wife, which encouraged her to open up to him about her own cancer. The couple began to throw parties to keep friends informed on Susan’s health. L. describes this social phase of their lives as “a great relief and a release for me, and I think it was a release for Susan, as well. It’s such a devastating, debilitating disease.”
L. went through a successful treatment for cancer himself a year after Susan died. He was too tired then to participate in CancerChatCanada as a patient, although he believes the experience of having been in it as a caregiver helped him deal with the ramifications of his disease. And he persuaded his new wife, Jane – whom he’d found on the dating website PlentyofFish.com using a profile that Susan and her friend had written with his future happiness in mind – to join the caregiver group.
It’s no wonder that people touched by cancer find getting together, even anonymously, helps, says Stephen. “They’re talking about the things that really matter.”
- Client: Doctors of BC
Richmond Division has cultural challenges in its efforts to match new immigrants with GPs
B.C.’s most culturally diverse communities have distinct issues when it comes to finding primary care for their residents.
To address them, Richmond Division is using funds from the Doctors of BC/Government of BC initiative A GP For Me to help immigrants navigate a medical system that may be quite different from the system in the country they left. It’s doing this by delivering information in a variety of ways to both newcomers and those who deal with them in the health care arena.
First, newcomers often need to be “sold” on the importance of a general practitioner. In many countries, says Beth Beeching, Health Literacy Project Manager for Richmond Division’s A GP For Me, a person who feels ill will identify the likely cause with friends or family, perhaps confer with an herbalist and then go directly to a specialist. A general practitioner may not even exist in that individual’s community.
In the Canadian system, of course, the patient starts with a GP, who may or may not refer him or her to a specialist, depending on the health issue.
Once a newcomer is persuaded that the GP is “their golden person” in terms of initiating health care, as Beeching puts it, he or she needs to be coached on how to get a health care card. Luckily, says Beeching, his or her first local connection is often a helpful immigrant care provider with a group like S.U.C.C.E.S.S., who will emphasize the importance of finding a GP while healthy, rather than waiting for a medical crisis.
The next obstacle may be language. While the family doctors most readily recruited to, or retained in, Richmond are English speakers from the U.S., the U.K. and Australia, many of Richmond’s newcomers are from China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, the Philippines and the Punjab. As a result, the resources that the Richmond Division produces must often be translated into a variety of Asian languages, says Nerissa Tai, its A GP for Me Project Coordinator.
A newcomer armed with a care card may wish to be matched with a doctor who speaks his or her language, but that individual’s in short supply, says Tai. Prospective patients can, however, access Cultural and Interpreter Services available through Vancouver Coastal Health clinics or HealthLink BC, which offers advice online and by phone in many languages, as long as the newcomers know those services exist.
After they’ve been matched with a doctor and have arrived for their appointment, some patients are reluctant to share their symptoms, because assertiveness may be viewed as rude in their culture, or they’re inhibited by the presence of the younger relative they’ve brought with them to translate.
“We’re trying to teach people that you are an advocate for your own health,” says Beeching.
That’s why the Division has created informative materials, including a brochure about how to talk to your doctor, what to ask him or her, and what to bring to a doctor’s appointment. Because so many cultures have a tradition of puppetry, Beeching is especially pleased with the puppet show the Division has created on the topic. It’s being filmed in four different languages – English, Cantonese, Mandarin and Punjabi – and will be posted on Vimeo and YouTube. Two local doctors wrote the script based on their own experiences with patients.
The communication lessons go both ways, however. Beeching’s Health Literacy for Residents Working Group, which includes three doctors and representatives from S.U.C.C.E.S.S., Vancouver Coastal Health, HealthLink BC, Richmond Health Advisory Committee and Richmond Public Library, has developed Health Literacy workshops on the topics of accessing primary care, not just for patients, but for physicians and health care providers.
The latter is really “train the trainer,” says Beeching – an introduction to such resources as the Division’s Health Choices poster, called “Think Where for Care,” which advises where to appropriately get information or treatment depending on the health concern. Participants in the Working Group provide input and insights to the group and publicly champion the resources it creates.
A GP For Me is also financing three training modules that support doctors to be better communicators, says Marnie Goldenberg, Project Lead, A GP For Me. “We were careful to try and make those materials responsive to cultural differences and really help doctors understand what was in their control as communicators and then what isn’t, where they might need to hold patients to account, and where they need to have some latitude.”
The accredited modules, which have proven popular, are intended to be experiential. They include a lot of practice in how to be better listeners and communicators. A few weeks after attending each one, doctors are required to participate in a one-hour phone call where they discuss how they’ve used the skills learned in the workshop with their patients.
Doctors need to improve their capacity to hear their patients, even though they are constrained by time, says Goldenberg. She hopes the modules have traction that will inspire other jurisdictions in the province.
“I think much of A GP for Me is about innovating and trying new things,” says Goldenberg. “And we’ve been innovating and trying new things.”
- Client: City of Vancouver; online article plus script for accompanying online video linked to the city's website. I've removed the last names of the participants here for privacy purposes.
Real value for real people
More than 600,000 people call Vancouver home and thousands more rely on the programs and services provided by one of the world’s most livable cities. Through careful planning and a balanced budget, the accountability for managing more than $1 billion is something we take seriously.
Intelligent investing means holding ourselves accountable for addressing public priorities and delivering the right level of service and the right programs that benefit the community, like the extension of hours across the City’s public library system.
Read on to see how the City is delivering real value back to the community.
Extended library hours a gift of time for busy family
When it comes to Vancouver’s public libraries, eight-year-old Caitlin is an aficionado. On most weekends, she heads off, parents in tow, to a different branch to return or replace some of the 50 books and movies she often has on loan.
“She reads a lot,” says her proud father, Jason. He believes the library’s decision to expand its Sunday openings across the system has been like a gift of time to his family. Like many parents, Jason and his wife, Teresa, hold down full-time jobs during the week, so quenching their daughter’s thirst for books and movies used to be something they had to squeeze in.
“Depending on what’s going on in our lives, we sometimes go Sundays and sometimes Saturdays,” he explains. “Sunday hours give our family much-needed flexibility.”
Based on community input, opening all Vancouver Public Library (VPL) branches on Sundays has topped VPL’s wish list for several years, explains Chief Librarian, Sandra.
“For people who work Monday to Friday, evenings and weekends are the prime times to access City services and facilities,” she explains. “Instead of letting our branches sit idle, Sunday hours provide our community with better access and enhanced flexibility to our entire system.”
To enable Sunday openings, VPL invested in technology designed to increase self-service check-out.
Nearly 83 per cent of patrons now check out materials using the self-service kiosks. This allows some staff positions previously dedicated to this task to be re-allocated to extend library hours.
The program was launched on International Literacy Day (September 8, 2013) and, as the City’s top librarian, Sandra was thrilled to hear about lineups at some VPL locations.
Even the Central branch downtown, which has been open on Sundays for years, has added two hours to that day’s schedule. “It’s one of our busiest locations,” says Sandra, “and it really is the nerve centre of the entire VPL network.”
Caitlin's family, residents of Vancouver’s Mount Pleasant neighbourhood, visits a variety of library locations to explore the unique features of each branch, its community and nearby playgrounds.
“Because we go every week, we like switching it up,” explains Jason. “Each of them has a unique feel and different books in its collection.”
Caitlin’s first move when she gets to any branch is to head to the picture book, children’s, and young fiction sections, while her parents browse stacks geared to adults. They’ll lend Caitlin a hand if she needs help finding something, but it’s their daughter who handles the automated checkout -- as she’s done for several years.
“It’s a great system,” Jason says of the self-serve arrangement. “There’s always a little lineup of kids waiting to check their books out. It helps them become self-reliant.”
Visit vancouver.ca/real-value to learn more on how the City of Vancouver is delivering value to residents and find details on the 2014 Budget.
VIDEO LENGTH:
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Date |
Time |
Location |
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Sunday, November 10, 2013 |
2:00 PM |
Kensington Public Library |
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Writer |
· Kate Zimmerman |
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Video Production |
· Thomas |
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Narrator |
· Viviana |
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Participants |
· Jason · Caitlin · Sandra, Chief Librarian |
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Scene |
Dialogue (181 words) |
Screen Direction/Illustration |
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1 |
More than 600,000 people call Vancouver home and thousands more rely on the programs and services provided by one of the world’s most livable cities. Through careful planning and a balanced budget, the accountability for managing more than $1 billion is something the City of Vancouver takes seriously. Intelligent investing means holding ourselves accountable for addressing public priorities and delivering the right level of service and the right programs that benefit the community, like the extension of hours across the City’s public library system. |
City of Vancouver, 2014 Budget and Real Value logo appear. |
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2 |
Eight-year-old Caitlin is one of hundreds of thousands of Vancouverites who now take advantage of Vancouver Public Library’s automated checkout system. The success of this system, which was rolled out in 2011 and 2012, has meant that libraries city-wide have been able to free up staff for other tasks and add 2,300 additional hours of access -- most of them on Sundays. |
Caitlin at the checkout kiosk, checking out a stack of books with others in the background |
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3 |
Eleven branches have joined the 10 that were already open on Sundays, and two more hours have been added to the Central library’s Sunday schedule. Chief librarian Sandra couldn’t be happier about serving the needs of the libraries’ 350,000 active cardholders. |
Sandra outside the Central branch. |
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4 |
More than 6 million visits were made to VPL in 2012, with patrons borrowing more than 10 million books, ebooks, CDs, DVDs and magazines. Nevertheless, says Sandra, VPL’s patrons have made it clear for years that they’d like more weekend hours. Weekend hours are crucial, says Sandra. People like to use the library with their families, to do research, access the internet stations, or pick up reading material, and they can’t always squeeze that into their busy Monday-Friday routine. The Sunday openings give them more choice. |
People milling about in a library, sitting at the computers, ushering their kids into the children’s sections, making copies, reading magazines. |
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5 |
Having more libraries open on Sundays also means a shorter trip for many people who can now visit their closest branch instead of a more distant branch where Sunday hours have long been in place. For those who are short on time or transportation, having their local branch open one more day every week can mean the difference between a leisurely browse, or doing important research, and not going to the library at all. |
A shot of somebody who appears to be encumbered. |
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6. |
Caitlin is an avid reader and also likes to take out DVDs, so her family goes to the library every weekend. Caitlin’s parents, Jason and Teresa, work Monday to Friday, so they appreciate the increased flexibility of Sunday openings for their library visits. They visit an assortment of libraries so they can explore different book collections, communities and nearby playgrounds. |
Jason and Caitlin arriving at a library, Caitlin rushing off to the kids’ section. If there’s a playground nearby, maybe a shot of that. |
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7. |
Jason says he doesn’t know what his family would do without the library. Caitlin usually has 50 library items out at a time, including picture books, storybooks, series and school-related reading. |
Jason helping Caitlin find a book on a higher shelf in the children’s section. A shot here of Caitlin surrounded by stacks of books, through which she’s leafing, would be great. |
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8. |
The Sunday openings allow their family increased variety in library branches, and the self-serve check-outs allow Caitlin a little independence. |
Shot of Caitlin and her dad making their way to the checkout kiosk with all their books and videos. |
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9. |
Learn more about how the City of Vancouver is delivering real value and details on the 2014 Budget by visiting vancouver.ca/real-value. |
City of Vancouver, 2014 Budget and Real Value logo appear with Vancouver.ca/real-value. |
