The Hearth of Long-Term Care

This was my first time For this style illustration.

As the world weathers the global Coronavirus pandemic, individuals living in long-term care facilities are facing a crisis within a crisis. Uniquely vulnerable due to age, disability, and preexisting conditions, long-term care residents and the frontline workers who care for them are now at the epicenter of the pandemic. The combination of large, high-risk populations, close living quarters, and intimate personal care has created an explosive cocktail of risk factors, and in city after city the disease has ravaged these facilities, producing over 50% of deaths from Covid-19 and establishing a grim pipeline to already-overwhelmed hospitals. Long-term care facilities--which include nursing homes, assisted living facilities, group homes, and convalescent hospitals--highlight a nexus of senior rights, disability rights, immigrant rights (many LTC workers are immigrants), and labor rights, and face an uphill battle as representatives of historically devalued and unseen populations. The residents and the workers need our protection now!

Artists 4 Long Term Care is a social action initiative that uses art and storytelling to raise awareness about the crisis facing residents and staff of long-term care facilities during the Covid-19 pandemic. We invite artists, photographers, writers, and filmmakers living inside and outside long-term care facilities to create works that confront this issue, to be shared on social media with the hashtag #artists4longtermcare. We encourage you to create images of love, appreciation, anger and humour with an eye towards increasing the visibility of those inside long-term care facilities. Our hope is that many of these materials will be displayed on the walls of these facilities to boost resident and staff morale.