Newsletter
May 2021
Pod Casts Coming Soon
Be Wise – Cannabis and Older Adults is taking us in a variety of directions to ensure that we reach as many older adults as possible across Canada. By the end of May we will have distributed close to 30,000 copies of the booklet to individuals, community centres, and organizations in all provinces and territories.
The NWT Seniors Society, a long-standing member of Active Aging Canada, assisted us in hosting a virtual focus group with older adults in the NWT. Based on recommendations from those participants, we decided to create pod casts of the Be Wise content to increase the reach of this information to Canadians from coast to coast to coast. The pod casts will be posted on a weekly basis starting the week of May 24th. Please share our resources with your members, clients, and colleagues.
Silver Time Blogs
Our Silver Times website hosts over 70 articles (English and French) in clear language, written by experts in their field, and available in pdf format to print off and post. These articles are still very relevant today, so we are going to move over the articles on a weekly basis from the Silver Times site to the Active Aging Canada website, and present them as a Blog postings. This will allow us to eventually close out the Silver Times website, keeping the valuable content from that site, and also drive more viewers to the Active Aging Canada page instead of splitting viewers between the two sites.
The blog postings will also begin the week of May 24th in a combined new Active Aging Minute e-blast announcing the new blogs and the pod cast posting for the week. Please share our e-blasts with your colleagues.
Member Highlight
The Centre on Aging at the University of Manitoba was established in 1982, as a University-wide research centre. The Centre with its partners generates, supports, and promotes interdisciplinary research on aging at Manitoba universities to improve the lives of older adults, their families, caregivers, and communities. With over 80 research affiliates from across the University of Manitoba, as well as from the University of Winnipeg, Brandon University and the Canadian Mennonite University, the Centre has a wide breadth of research topics being covered. In addition to its mandate to facilitate excellence in research, the Centre also strives to provide ample opportunities for knowledge exchange with community groups, as well as training of students on aging. Each year the Centre hosts a Spring Research Symposium, which routinely attracts a large audience of practitioners, students, researchers and older adults. The Centre also runs a speaker series that is open to all. A major initiative of the Centre is chairing the Age-friendly University Committee which started in 2016. This committee was formed when the University of Manitoba became the first University in Canada to endorse the age-friendly university principles, as well as joined the global network led by Dublin City University.
Member Representative
Dr. Michelle Porter is the Director of the Centre on Aging at the University of Manitoba, a position she has held since 2015. She is also a Professor in the Faculty of Kinesiology and Recreation Management. Michelle’s BPHE (Laurentian University), MSc (Community Health, University of Toronto) and PhD (Kinesiology, UWO) were capped by a multi-site Post-Doctoral Fellowship in Boston and Scandinavia. She has been involved with physical activity and aging research since her undergraduate studies in the 1980s. Her current aging-related work spans the areas of ageism, quality of life in long-term care, WHO’s healthy aging action plan, age-friendly environments, as well as various aspects of mobility and transportation.
Michelle is a leader in the age-friendly university movement, and was influential in UM becoming one of the world’s first age-friendly universities (Canada’s first). She is involved with many provincial, national and international organizations. In recognition of her many research and service contributions, Michelle was named a Fellow of the Gerontological Society of America.
Michelle has been involved with Active Aging Canada since the early 2000s, and has had many roles including being on the Research Committee as well as the Executive. Currently she is the Vice-Chair.
Membership Renewals
Membership renewals have been sent via email to all current members. If you have not received your renewal notice, please contact me. As always, we thank you all for your ongoing support of Active Aging Canada.
Patricia Clark
National Executive Director
exdir@activeagingcanada.ca
