DRPI Canada Annual General Meeting, November 3rd-4th, 2009
The 2009 Annual General Meeting of DRPI Canada was held November 3rd and 4th at York University bringing together project leaders, co-applicants, organizational partners, students, and the coordinators of the project’s monitoring sites. In spite of the impending flu season, the meeting was attended by over 20 participants traveling to Toronto from as far as St. John’s and Vancouver, making this year’s meeting another DRPI success. This incredibly useful
two-day gathering reunited the project group who put together its unique experiences and knowledge to move forward and advance research valuable from the grassroots level
to international reporting
.
Mrs. Susan Ralph addressing members at DRPI Canada's AGM
The first day of the meeting gave each theme of the project the opportunity to provide a brief presentation outlining its progress to-date and to share stories of success as well as to highlight difficulties to be addressed throughout the duration of the project, establishing what's happening now
, and to see how each dimension of the project is connecting
. The intense and thought-provoking day concluded with a group dinner at Michael Angelo’s restaurant at York University.
The second day of the meeting supplied the opportunity to work in break-out groups to consider other themes data and to strategize and create work plans relating to the next steps of the project. This work helped to bring forth concerns about the integration of community and university partners in relation to where this information is going
, to recognize the big challenge
which lays ahead to inform what is really the magnitude of the rights of people with disabilities
, and the need for more results to face this challenge
.
With several aspects of the project in the final phase of data collection, the relevance of this work to the disability community and the disability rights movement was identified by participants as very relevant to individual and systemic and legal issues, the project providing a template for monitoring which can be potentially translated into reality
. The work that has been done to-date and the continued efforts of DRPI Canada were observed as pertinent to the current situation of people with disabilities noting that human rights monitoring in the advent of the Convention is an increasingly hot topic
and that this type of data gathering proves authoritative evidence beyond the anecdotal giving the information a layer of credibility that it hasn't had in the past
.