A personal care home in Winnipeg has compiled a collection of life advice from its residents to start a new hotline. Misericordia Place launched its life advice line on Wednesday. The hotline allows callers to select options for advice ranging from love to how to survive a Winnipeg winter. “The origin of this project is to get to know people who live here and to share all of their knowledge and experience with the community,” said Natalie Baird, an artist in residence at the centre who helped coordinate the project. Baird said the hotline came from art sessions with residents of the centre, and noticing how excited they got to share stories and draw pictures from their life experiences. “Over the last 10 years, we’ve done lots of interviews with residents and patients about their artwork. It usually starts with ‘Can you tell me about what you drew and what it means to you, or what you were thinking about?’ And then people end up talking about their whole lives, what kind of work they did, their experience in their family, their imagination,” she said. “Now we have like this wide archive of interviews and material from people, and I think it was really interesting to frame people’s life experience as advice, and that also allowed us to ask more direct questions like, ‘Do you have advice for kids going back to school? Or do you have advice for someone in their 40s, or do you have advice for someone starting a family or starting a new job?” Baird said she is hoping to eventually expand the hotline to include more of the advice shared during the sessions. The hotline can be accessed by calling 204-788-8060.
