Story written by Alison Homer, with special thanks to W. Y. Alice Chan for providing the source material
“We all need to feel a connection greater than us. This is not a luxury but a human right.”
Devon, an adult with an intellectual and developmental disability featured in a spirituality initiative commissioned by posAbilities, shared these words while reflecting on connection and belonging. He described finding spirituality in nature, where the trees, ocean, and mountains bring peace, happiness, and a sense of connection.
His reflection points to a question at the heart of the Centre for Civic Religious Literacy’s (CCRL) work: what happens when identity, meaning, spirituality, and purpose are overlooked in the places and systems that shape people’s lives?
Across Canada, CCRL is helping organizations explore that question. Through research, dialogue, training, and community engagement, the Montreal-based nonprofit supports people and institutions to better understand religious, spiritual, and secular identities and the role they play in people’s lives.
Executive Director and Co-Founder W. Y. Alice Chan describes civic religious literacy as a practical skill for engaging respectfully with people whose beliefs and experiences differ from our own. Across sectors, a similar lesson continues to emerge: when people feel seen and understood, they are more likely to feel that they belong.
Making Room for Spiritual Wellbeing
One of the clearest examples comes from Metro Vancouver, where CCRL partnered with posAbilities, Kinsight, the Burnaby Association for Community Inclusion, and Curiko to explore spiritual wellbeing among adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities.
The initiative began after partners identified a gap in existing supports. While organizations were addressing health, relationships, daily living, and community participation, spirituality and meaning-making received far less attention despite evidence that purpose, hope, reflection, creativity, and connection contribute significantly to quality of life.
To better understand this gap, CCRL conducted surveys, interviews, and focus groups involving 167 staff members, six adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities, and 75 family members.
Participants described spirituality in many ways. Some connected it to religious faith or Indigenous traditions. Others spoke about nature, culture, friendship, creativity, joy, or a sense of connection to something larger than themselves.
Sandra described practising both Indigenous culture and Christianity after experiencing pressure to choose between them: “I live in two worlds. I value both.” Others challenged assumptions about disability and spirituality.
One participant explained that people with neurodivergent minds may understand spirituality “at a different level than they realize.” Another rejected the idea that adults with disabilities should be shielded from these conversations: “We are not dolls that are going to break.”
Their stories revealed a deeper issue. Many felt that others often saw their disability before seeing them as complete people with beliefs, hopes, questions, relationships, and sources of meaning. When conversations about spirituality were avoided, an important part of their lives often remained invisible.
Listening Across Roles and Experiences
Adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities contributed to the initiative alongside family members, frontline staff, managers, executives, board members, researchers, and organizational leaders.
The findings revealed strong interest alongside considerable uncertainty. Seventy-five per cent of surveyed staff said spirituality was important or very important to them, while 74 per cent believed people in their roles should support the spiritual development and expression of adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities.
Yet many felt unprepared to do so.
Some worried about influencing the people they supported. Others anticipated concerns from colleagues or family members. Many felt they lacked training, guidance, or a shared language for discussing spirituality in ways that respected different beliefs and abilities.
Rather than simply documenting these challenges, the initiative created opportunities for people to work through them together. Participants explored spirituality through art, music, nature, reflection, sacred objects, and conversation. Adults with lived experience helped shape both the research and the learning that emerged from it.
The experience reinforced something Chan has observed across many initiatives. People are often hesitant to discuss religion, spirituality, or belief at first. But when conversations begin with curiosity and a genuine desire to listen, they tend to deepen quickly.
The challenge is rarely a lack of interest. More often, people simply do not know how to start.
Turning Understanding into Workplace Change
The same commitment to listening and local context shaped CCRL’s work in Temiskaming Shores, a rural Ontario city of approximately 10,000 people.
Local employers were facing recruitment and retention challenges while seeking ways to better welcome newcomers and members of local Indigenous communities. Through interviews, focus groups, and community conversations, CCRL and its partners developed a locally relevant Inter-faith Employee Resource Group and a Faith and Belief Friendly Workplace Certification.
The employee resource group created opportunities for employers and staff to learn together. Eighteen local participants completed the certification, which helped organizations translate learning into workplace policies, accommodations, and management practices.
The learning quickly moved beyond discussion. Employers strengthened non-discrimination policies, reviewed accommodation practices, increased awareness of faith-related needs, and explored more flexible scheduling around religious observances. At the Haileybury Beach Motel, new practices ranged from making religious texts available upon request to considering alternative holiday arrangements for staff.
Vimla Minezes described the certification as “a game changer” that opened the team’s minds to practices they had never previously considered. Another participant captured the broader impact: “It helps us engage and involve staff by letting them know that they are welcome to bring their whole self to work.”
Changing Systems Through Understanding
CCRL’s work demonstrates that systems change often begins long before policies are rewritten. It starts when assumptions are challenged and conversations become possible.
As employers, service providers, and community leaders engage with questions of spirituality, religion, belief, and identity, long-held assumptions begin to shift. Relationships deepen as people from different backgrounds learn together. Power shifts when lived experience helps shape research, training, and decision-making.
Over time, those shifts show up in practice: workplace accommodations, staff training, organizational guidelines, and new approaches to supporting wellbeing.
The approach is now being applied in new contexts across Canada. In Saskatchewan, CCRL is leading a multi-year collaboration with the Saskatoon Open Door Society and the Regina Open Door Society, the province’s two largest immigration and settlement agencies. The initiative responds to concerns about discrimination affecting Ukrainians, Muslims, Jews, Indigenous Peoples, and others by strengthening civic religious literacy within the settlement sector. Through research and community engagement, the initiative is helping inform locally relevant training while building stronger understanding of newcomers’ experiences and concerns.
While each initiative looks different, the underlying approach remains the same: start by listening, learn from lived experience, and build responses that reflect local realities.
Building Belonging Through Curiosity
Civic religious literacy has implications far beyond disability services and workplaces. It can strengthen settlement services, philanthropy, education, and community life by helping people navigate differences with greater confidence and understanding.
As Chan often reminds audiences: “Religious literacy is for everybody.”
The work is not about becoming an expert in every faith, worldview, or tradition. Basic religious literacy knowledge is important, but it is equally about developing the skills, curiosity and confidence to engage respectfully across differences. CCRL’s religious literacy framework provides details.
As their work continues to grow, CCRL’s focus remains constant. Whether the conversation involves spirituality, disability, workplaces, newcomer experiences, or community life, people are more likely to thrive when they are recognized as whole human beings rather than reduced to a single aspect of their identity.
Chan summarizes the purpose of the work this way: “We can’t get there and we can’t know our common goals unless we have a desire to see past our fears and assumptions.”
That willingness to move beyond fear and toward curiosity creates the conditions for belonging. Across disability services, workplaces, settlement organizations, and community life, CCRL’s work is helping people see one another more fully. And when people are seen as whole human beings, new possibilities for connection, participation, and community begin to emerge.
Learn More
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Centre for Civic Religious Literacy (CCRL): Website | Facebook | Instagram | LinkedIn
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Framework: What is civic religious literacy?
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Reports: Uncomfortable with spirituality | Findings from discussion adults with IDD
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Article: We Are Not “Dolls That Are About to Break”: Spirituality and Adults with Mild to Moderate Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities
Project: Spirituality among individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities
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Project: Creating “Faith and Belief Friendly” Workplaces
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Funding announcement: Building Community Leadership Capacity in Saskatchewan
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Articles:
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Cult MTL | Quebec needs religious literacy now
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The Philanthropist | How civic religious literacy can help philanthropy make a bigger impact
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Podcast: Talking about religion in a divided world | Substack | Spotify | Apple
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YouTube: Centre for Civic Religious Literacy | posAbilitiesCA
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