Season 4- Episode 51: Celebrate Life

Although Granville Johnson is living with dementia, he remains part of the community. Granville is a website designer, an artist, a musician (jimbe), a teacher (school and music), and a community dignitary, and he performs and speaks at community events. After he was diagnosed with dementia, he continued his community work introduced by the BC Alzheimer society. He was introduced to the Dementia Action Group and has become an advocate for himself and others living with dementia (creating a toolkit and dementia celebrate life t-shirt). a program about reducing stigma. He is currently in a band called “The day will come project,” and they have written the lyrics and music for their debut album to be recorded in June 2022. The album is about his life living with dementia. He is also writing his autobiographical, fictional novel, with the first volume finished in June to coincide with the release of his album. Through his work as an advocate, he has found his community. He works towards educating the public about dementia but also supporting his peers.

Alison Phinney speaks about her work as a nurse and, over the years working with dementia and how that has led her to create a new community-based program called Building Capacity Project. This is a project that is a partnership between Vancouver and Thunder Bay. The purpose is to discover the assets that the community has and develop that would support people with dementia in a better way.

In episode 1, Granville and Alison speak about how they each got involved in community-based work and speak extensively about stigma and fear and how they are working to make a change. Granville talk in detail about one of two projects – Creating a t-shirt that has been distributed to change people’s perspective of what living with dementia is about.

In the second episode, Alison and Granville describe a Toolkit that came out of a collaboration between the community and people living with the experience of dementia and is meant to help others understand their experiences in the hopes that engagement and inclusion of those with dementia will become normalized. 

Alison's Bio

Granville's Poem