Building a L’Arche Public Education Strategy to Foster Compassionate Love

For over 50 years L’Arche has demonstrated that people with an intellectual disability have a unique ability to inspire and call forth the growth of Compassionate Love in others. This funding proposal is about building L’Arche's capacity to “message” its experience in order to foster the growth of Compassionate Love in the lives of many more people, especially young people. It is important because L’Arche as an organization is accepting the public education/messaging baton that is being passed to the organization from founder Jean Vanier. Our project involves three core activities: 1. Create, disseminate, and evaluate a series of short films that positively present the lives of people with disabilities. Although a stand-alone campaign, the learning from this campaign will be part of the “research and development” that feeds into a larger process of creating a Strategic and Implementation Plan to foster Compassionate Love (see #3 below). 2. Undertake a literature review to bring together all research that has been done on L’Arche in the past, and undertake an external environmental scan to better understand the broader public education context within which L’Arche’s mission and expertise is lived and shared. 3. Engage in a visioning and planning process, with the assistance of an external consultant, to develop a robust three-year Strategic and Implementation Plan for L’Arche’s work of public education.