June will be the 18th anniversary of Creating Accessible Neighbourhoods. It is hard to fathom that what started as a single issue organization has become an organization with workshop participants from around the world.
We felt this was the perfect time to rebrand to better encapsulate, in our name, the work we are doing. While we still love the name Creating Accessible Neighbourhoods (CAN BC), it does sometimes cause confusion and doesn’t capture the broad spectrum of issues we educate about and advocate for. Examples of confusion include potential clients not hiring us because we have BC in our title (making them think we only work within that province) and people thinking that we only work in certain neighbourhoods.
CAN (LET’S) proudly recognizes that a feature that sets us apart from other organizations is that all our staff, workshop facilitators, researchers, and creators have lived expertise with the
population they represent. We wanted to capture this within our new name. Our name change committee worked with Kipling Media and our board. We came up with some great options. Out of all the options, there was 1 that everyone immediately connected with: Live Educate Transform Society (LET’S). (Note: live can be pronounced 2 ways, ours rhymes with give.)
We love that the new name explains exactly what we do. We take lived expertise, educate people, organizations, businesses, government, and communities and transform minds and spaces. We are also really excited by the acronym LET’S. We plan on using it in our workshops to ask participants to make LET’S pledges.
These pledges would be a commitment to use something they learned from us in some part of their life (work, family, community work, volunteering, friends, neighbors, online, etc.). We can also use it to give voice to the work we do, for example: LET’S be anti-ableist, LET’S work together for collective liberation, LET’S commit to learning about one another, LET’s connect, etc.
We will have opportunities for people to add their own LET’S statement. An example is East Side Pride and Vancouver Pride Festival. We will have stickies and a board for people to write their own LET’S statements and read other people’s.
We are excited by this new chapter!
For this newsletter, we will use a combination of the 2 names (CAN/LET’S) to transition readers. In the May + June newsletter, we will only use LET’S.