FIGHTING FOR DISABLED-FRIENDLY HOUSING
Resource Society helps build homes for people with severe disabilities

Imagine your home as the enemy.

Not the king of phony Hollywood horror of flying furniture and compacting walls, but a real nightmare of daily living in a world stacked against you.

Ken Fraser understands. One minute the executive director of the Vancouver Resource Society was a typically testosterone-fuelled young man living in Pemberton, the next someone whose legs no longer followed orders.

"I dove into a pool when I was 21 years old," recalled Fraser.

Simple, painful and irreversible.

Now, all these years, bumps, scrapes and falls later, Fraser is executive director of the organization that helps build housing for those who move at a 33 rpm pace in a 78 spinning world. It's tough but the smiles the Vancouver Resource Society produces for its 100-plus clients last for miles.

When he was first confronted with life in a wheelchair in the early 1980s, the world was a less disabled-friendly place than it is today. Fraser drew on his courage, plus support from wife Leanne, family and friends to go on. But for others less blessed, there was and remains considerable prejudice and physical barriers to overcome.

"Who's to say that when you can't look after yourself, Fraser, 41, said. "your standard of living should end?"

The able world has been that cruel.

But the too-common solution of "medicating yourself into submission" was not an option for a group of polio victims at Pearson Hospital. They "busted out" in 1972 and formed the VRS, to find a place for people to live with dignity whom government or charity wouldn't or couldn't help.

"Our clients are very high needs," said Fraser of the men and women dotted in purpose-built and adapted structures throughout the city. "We have a lot of non-verbal, multi-disability, mental and physical-activity-reduced clients. They are best in our homes."

Ideally, like the Blair Court building near Arbutus and Broadway where VRS clients have 12 of the 39 units, there is a resident careworker. But, while Fraser acknowledges "the 24-hour-care model gives a lot more independence, those models are really hard (financially) to put together."

Margo Browne, 73, loves her marriage to Blair Court.

"There's no comparison" to her former residence, a group home, said the Quebec native who's confined to a wheelchair by muscular dystrophy.

Browne returns the favour for the VRS and Blair residents by planting and tending to the beautiful courtyard gardens.

"I enjoy the garden," added Browne. "I get up and get out."

Gloria Kocay is the VRS director of client services. She hears the pain caused by a lack of proper housing for the severely disabled.

"A lot of people are quite desperate," says the veteran RN. "We get five to six calls a day. For many, other than a hospital, there is not a suitable home for them. It's very frustrating. I wish I had a place for them."

But so confident is Fraser and determined to fight for the best feasible solution for VRS clients that he can say proudly of one particularly poignant case: "I guarantee you he would not have lasted (lived) as long without our care."

For non-profit agencies, money and allies are not as available as the VRS would like. The current soft land market doesn't help.

Fraser said the only time "the developers need us" as a social housing component to trade to the public for zoning approval "is in the toughest cases."

But through all the challenges, Kocay said that one thought drives the VRS in its mission - care.

"We are really focused on the issue," she said. "We don't lose sight of that."