Lori Vaanholt has learned much in her over 35 years with L'Arche Canada.

A national vice-executive director of the organization that champions the talents of people with intellectual disabilities and seeks to build a more inclusive world first joined this non-profit as a 19-year-old placement student.

Vaanholt said she arrived at L’Arche Daybreak in Richmond Hill, Ont., “with some pretty clear ideas of what I felt I was going to contribute to this organization and the care and support that I was going to provide to these people with developmental disabilities.”

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David Harmon, a late founding member of L’Arche Daybreak — the oldest L’Arche community in North America, established in 1969 — subtly yet powerfully guided Vaanholt toward shifting her mindset. (There are nearly 160 L'Arche communities in 37 nations around the world).

“David Harmon put me on a program that helped me discover that skills and professional capacities are important, but what was equally important was that I needed to learn about being in right and just relationship with people,” said Vaanholt. “Co-leadership, collaboration and learning together was a much more impactful and important way of being in the world.”

In an interview with The Catholic Register, Vaanholt shared examples and stories about how she is holding to this mentality.

She discussed L’Arche Canada’s recent collaboration with the Zero Project, a global research initiative aimed at discovering and implementing solutions that enhance the daily lives and legal rights of all individuals with disabilities. The partnership with this non-profit enterprise was largely driven by Nicholas Herd, a creative advocacy coordinator with L’Arche Canada for many years.

Herd, a man living with an intellectual disability, has long sought to help individuals with disabilities share their stories. Vaanholt and other members of the L’Arche team accompanied Herd to the 2025 Zero Project Conference in Vienna, Austria, from March 5-7, to support him in amplifying the voices and stories of other people with disabilities “who are doing some pretty incredible things in this world.”

Her team worked with Herd to shape these multimedia interviews using best practices: the interviewee received the questions in advance, gained a firm understanding of the purpose behind the video and was made comfortable so that the essence of their personality was captured.

Vaanholt said Herd’s approach aligns with L’Arche’s advocacy strategy to provide people with the space to share their experiences and convictions.

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“He says pretty clearly that nobody can tell anybody else's disability story for them and that it's really important to hear from people with disabilities,” said Vaanholt.

As media leads at the conference, L’Arche Canada was also keen to empower emerging leaders so a young woman with an intellectual disability from the United Kingdom named Sian Walker received on-site mentorship and an intergenerational transfer of knowledge from Herd.

L’Arche Canada, which has a footprint in over 30 Canadian communities, also continues its longstanding mission of making available accessible and inclusive housing. The spirit of collaborative co-leadership and elevating voices valued by Vaanholt was evident when partnering on a solutions lab with the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC).

“The advisory committee was co-led by people with intellectual disabilities,” said Vaanholt. “When we decided that that's what we were going to do, we had lots of questions about how it was going to be possible. And I wish I would be lying if I said I had any of the answers before we actually kind of got into doing the work.”

It was an illuminating experience for the public planners, policy experts and funders participating in the venture.

“Although they've been in places and spaces where they had been making decisions about housing that would impact people with intellectual disabilities, many of them had never actually met a person with an intellectual disability,” said Vaanholt.

One participant admitted to Vaanholt that he or she was initially anxious about working with a person with an intellectual disability because of a fear of communicating improperly.

Vaanholt shared that the person told her “‘now that I've had this experience, I'm not afraid any more. I may not know a person and I might say the wrong thing and that I might do all of those sorts of things, but I know that the experience of working together is what's needed to inform these things.’”

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Vaanholt said the “shared sense of community and desire to build community” that drives L’Arche Canada is also evident with Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of Toronto. She declared the two organizations are “are two chambers of the same heart.”

“We're on a path together,” said Vaanholt. “We don't always share exactly the same opinions around different things, but we're working together to create a community in which each person belongs. God and social justice are working together in all of those areas.”