By Mia McGowan

Spinclusion, a game that encourages children and youth to celebrate differences and include everyone has had quite a year. Thanks to funding from the United Way, our Spinclusion website has gone from functional to fabulous.  It is now bright, bold and user friendly. It is packed with facilitator tips, game pieces and everything a facilitator will need to have a succesful Spinclusion session. The French version of the game is going to enable us to expand our audience substantially. That means more children and youth will be thinking about people’s feelings, thinking positively about differences and looking beyond disability to a person’s abilities.

The Spinclusion training across Canada has been incredible. From Victoria to Saint John’s, 141 new facilitators from 108 organizations in 7 provinces and 1 territory are ready to go out into their communities and promote inclusion in a fun and engaging way with their newly received Spinclusion games. It has been a pleasure travelling with Jenna Martinuzzi to some of the locations. After successfuly training new Spinclusion facilitatators in Winnipeg, we had an opportunity to visit the Human Rights Museum.  It really had an impact on both of us.

Spinclusion was very well received in every community. The new facilitators were immediately thinking of how they could use the game. A First Nations community in Alberta that suffered devestating floods last year determined that Spinclusion would be just the tool needed to encourage the children to discuss the trauma they had endured. In PEI, a parents‘ group will play Spinclusion to encourage them to be inclusive of all children in their community. In Nunavut, school children will build a Spinclusion Inukshuk as a reminder to be a good friend and include everyone.  These are just some of the innovative ways Spinclusion will be used to promote inclusion.

Thank you United Way  for this fantastic opportunity to train, distribute and promote Spinclusion from coast to coast.  It has truly been an amazing year!