The siblings workshop Citizens with a Cause was a workshop designed for young people (aged 14-29) who are a sibling of someone who has an intellectual disability. We brought together youth from across Canada to help connect siblings to other siblings, to think about how our experiences impact our lives and wellbeing and to energize and reinforce resiliency in young advocates. The workshop sparked conversations for continued work geared towards siblings. At the end of the workshop, we released the guidebook “Siblings: Citizens with a Cause”. This guidebook contains information on self-care as an advocate, how to create a self-care kit and phone book, learning your boundaries as an advocate, self-reflection on your experiences and how to use them to start conversations with your family.
This guidebook is geared towards siblings, but it can be a great resource for ALL advocates! Self-care is an important practice no matter who you are as an individual. Knowledge and information about self-care, self-care kits, and boundaries are great for anyone. Most of the self-reflection questions can be slightly adjusted to suit self-advocates along with ally advocates. The ‘Starting a conversation’ segment of the guidebook can also be a good template for thinking about the conversations you as an ally or self-advocate might want to have with the adults in your life, such as family and adult allies.
