CO-WRITTEN BY FARHAD FARHANGFAR, MOHAMMAD NOURI, FARYAR MOHAMMADI, ALISON HOMER, NATHAN LI, AND JORGE GARZA
Across North America, loneliness, isolation, and disconnection are becoming defining challenges for people of all ages. For people living with dementia, those challenges are often compounded by stigma, exclusion, and assumptions about what they are no longer able to do.
The Dementia Co-Creation Academy in Burnaby was created in response to a different question: What becomes possible when people living with dementia are recognized as contributors with gifts, talents, and experiences to share?
Since 2024, people living with dementia, care partners, volunteers, artists, health professionals, students, and community members have been coming together to create, learn, and build relationships. What has emerged is a community where people are valued for their gifts, creativity, lived experience, and ability to contribute.
The Academy grew from a belief that a dementia diagnosis should not mean losing a sense of purpose, agency, or belonging. While dementia may be the entry point, the work responds to a broader challenge facing communities. Rising isolation and loneliness affect people across generations. The Academy creates opportunities for people to connect through shared experiences and discover what they can build together.
The Academy's work speaks directly to one of Canada's recognized Quality of Life indicators: sense of belonging to community. For many older adults, and particularly for people living with dementia and their care partners, opportunities to contribute, participate, and build relationships can have a profound influence on wellbeing. The Academy was created around the belief that meaningful relationships, contribution, and community connection are essential parts of living well.
The work is grounded in Asset-Based Community Development. Rather than focusing on needs, deficits, or services, the Academy begins with strengths. Gifts, relationships, cultural traditions, stories, talents, aspirations, and community connections become the foundation for belonging. Partnering organizations contribute space, expertise, resources, and encouragement, but they do not direct the work. Instead, they trust community members, volunteers, care partners, and people living with dementia to lead. As co-founder Farhad Farhangfar explains, partnering organizations support the initiative while stepping back from planning and strategic decision-making. This reflects what ABCD founder John McKnight described as an ideal relationship between local institutions and grassroots community leadership.
The work is done with people, not for them. People living with dementia help shape activities, generate ideas, create artwork, lead projects, and influence the direction of the initiative.
Faryar Mohammadi, the Academy's co-founder, explains,
For us, the central question is not just, 'What was the output of the project?' but, 'What remains alive in the community between community projects, and how does the community keep regenerating?'
Output tells us what we did, while impact tells us whether what we created continues to matter over time.
The Academy's model, Asset-Based Collective Recreational Learning and Therapy, brings recreation, learning, and therapy together through community experiences centred on joy, food, art, music, storytelling, movement, creativity, and play.
Recreation provides the starting point because it gives people a reason to gather. Shared experiences become relationships. Relationships create trust. Trust creates opportunities for contribution, learning, leadership, and community participation. Through that process, people experience greater belonging, meaning, hope, and wellbeing.
Since launching, the Academy has hosted participatory art projects, pottery, mosaics, music and dance activities, bread-making, laughter yoga, brain games, creative workshops, craft-making, and dementia-awareness initiatives. Activities evolve in response to participant interests rather than predetermined programming.
Each session attracts an average of 35 participants and often has a waitlist. Approximately 50 per cent of participants identify as living with dementia or memory-related challenges. Thirty-six volunteers from diverse ages, cultures, professions, and lived experiences contribute to the work, including artists, nurses, therapists, recreation specialists, students, family members, newcomers, and international collaborators.
The impact is reflected in the experiences participants describe.
One member shared, “I found a new family in Canada.”
Another said, “I always feel happy and excited here.”
A third reflected, “Each session I attend I go home feeling relaxed and accomplished.”
One member offered a perspective that has stayed with the team:
“Without a dementia diagnosis, I would have never known you and would never have experienced this much joy, love, and connection.”
These reflections reveal something deeper than enjoyment or satisfaction with an activity. They point to connection, purpose, participation, and a stronger sense of belonging.
For the Academy team, the final quote captures an important insight. If communities change how they see and support one another, even a vulnerability such as dementia can become a community asset. It can become a reason to build relationships, strengthen belonging, and create community around something meaningful. In that sense, dementia inclusion becomes a pathway to connection and de-stigmatization.
The benefits extend beyond participants living with dementia. Volunteers frequently describe receiving as much from the experience as they contribute. They report stronger relationships, a deeper sense of purpose, greater confidence, increased empathy, and a stronger sense of belonging.
Volunteers are not recruited to fill service gaps. They act as initiators, connectors, co-creators, co-leaders, and co-owners of change. They help shape priorities, develop projects, build partnerships, and create opportunities for others to participate.
One youth volunteer transformed the experience of losing a grandfather to dementia into community action by creating a volleyball initiative that raised awareness and support for dementia inclusion. Other young volunteers have used their experiences to build leadership skills and create opportunities for education, employment, and community engagement.
Intergenerational participation has become one of the Academy's defining strengths. Families sometimes volunteer across three generations. Youth and older adults learn and create together. Professional expertise sits alongside lived experience. These relationships open opportunities for friendship, learning, mentorship, and creativity that rarely emerge in programs organized around age, diagnosis, or professional roles.
The initiative itself has been built largely through community assets and relationships. A retirement residence provided space and refreshments. Artists shared their expertise. Local businesses donated food. Community organizations opened their doors. Partnerships grew because people saw value in what was being created and wanted to contribute to its success.
The Academy's influence is now reaching well beyond Burnaby. Eleven co-created artworks were featured through a partnership with the Burnaby Stride Festival, Dania Home, and Shadbolt Centre for the Arts. Team members helped write Building Community Capacity for Dementia Inclusion, a practical guide designed to help communities create more inclusive environments for people living with dementia. The guide has been featured internationally, and the Academy's approach has been shared through conference presentations, community forums, research partnerships, and knowledge-sharing initiatives in Canada and beyond.
In 2026, the team established the TrueNetwork Community Solutions Society to support future collaboration, research, knowledge sharing, and community-led innovation. The new organization reflects the same principles that shape the Academy: shared ownership, co-leadership, relationship-building, and community engagement.
The work has reinforced a simple lesson. People rarely change their assumptions because they receive more information. Change often begins through experience. When people create together, share food, tell stories, laugh, and contribute to something meaningful, relationships form and perspectives begin to shift.
As Farhangfar reflects:
"We believe meaningful impact becomes possible when our stories from the past connect with our collective dream for the future, and we bring them to life through co-creation in the present."
The Dementia Co-Creation Academy is showing what can happen when communities recognize the strengths, creativity, and contributions of every person. By creating spaces where people living with dementia continue to create, teach, lead, and contribute, the Academy is helping build a community where everyone has something valuable to offer.
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