CVNQuinte Adventures: Build It and They Will Come
Exploring the Emergence of CVNQuinte Adventures
To learn more or book a retreat, contact CVNQuinte.
Hear the first-hand accounts of CVNQuinte Adventures in this special micro-documentary:
A homegrown weekend retreat is giving adults across the Quinte region something rare: a real vacation, a new circle of friends, and a chance to be known. And it is giving their families room to breathe.
Addressing the Need
When Terri and her team at CVNQuinte first pictured a themed weekend getaway for adults living with an intellectual disability, they knew they were designing a unique approach in their sector. They were sure of one thing: the need was real, and it was going unmet.
“It’s a great opportunity for people who don’t have services currently,” Terri says. Across the region, families who care for a loved one living with an intellectual disability often sit on wait lists for funding from the Ministry of Community and Social Services. When that funding falls short, the support many households are counting on simply are not there.
CVNQuinte Adventures grew out of that gap. Rather than wait for ministry dollars that may never arrive, the team decided to fundraise for the one piece they could control, the wages of the employees who work each weekend, and to gather the rest from the community: activities, meals, and sponsorships from local partners who want to help. “It takes a village,” Terri says, leaning on the time-honoured axiom. “And this is a village that we’re reaching out to.”
Built Around What People Want
As far as the team knows, the model is one-of-a-kind in the province. Plenty of agencies offer day programs or respite inside a group home. Very few, Terri says, offer themed retreats “where complete strangers come together and share the common passion of whatever the theme is, and then become new friends.” Weekends are built around what participants say they want to do, not around a schedule they are asked to fit into.
And the themes have gone almost anywhere. Participants have thrown pottery and soaked one another in a splatter-paint session. They have visited a buffalo farm and an ostrich farm, played laser tag on a James Bond weekend, toured an aviation museum on a trains, planes and automobiles theme, and sat in on a Lord of the Rings orchestral concert. One weekend downtown turned into a street-art photo shoot. “The sky’s the limit,” Terri says.
For Kyra, who plans and organizes the weekends, the reward is in the small moments. “If you stop and slow down and pay attention,” she says, “then you can always see something really special happening.” She has watched participants arrive shy and apprehensive on a Friday night and leave on Sunday with new friends and stories to tell. Early on, the team was working from intake forms and first impressions. Now that many participants return, and bring friends, Kyra can plan around what people genuinely love. She calls it one of the most rewarding stretches of a long career, “getting to watch people live their best life.”
Effective on so many levels
The people at the centre of it describe the same thing in their own words.
Melissa, a self-described frequent flier now on her fifth adventure, still laughs about the water buffalo farm, where a buffalo latched onto a staff member’s shirt and would not let go while the group wrestled it free, and her own shirt came home covered in buffalo slobber. She models prosocial habits for her peers by helping cook a Sunday breakfast. “It’s my way of saying thank you for coming and hanging out with me,” she says. For her, the point runs deeper than the activities. Meeting new people out in the community, she explains, is a chance to show that “we’re no different than you guys are.”
Bradley, quiet and with his sly smile, came in for his first on-camera interview and named his favourite without hesitation: “The buffaloes.” An artist at heart, he loves the craft weekends, painting cups and splattering canvases, and he grins recounting a laser tag win. Ask him why he likes going, and the answer is one word: “Friends.”
Meeting the needs of the whole family
Max, who has done a handful of weekends, is a laser tag devotee and a fan of the big early planes at the aviation museum. He met an ostrich for the first time and pronounced it to be “very cute.” His mother, Tatyana, describes a quiet role reversal. For years, respite meant support workers coming to the home while she went away. Now it is Max who packs a bag. “Bye, Mom, I’m going,” are words that resonate with her, she explains. Then she adds, “and then I hear ‘I’m home,’ and I get to anticipate his stories when he comes back.” She admits she parked down the lane for the first hour after that first drop-off, phone in hand. She does not anymore. The employees, she says, are very well trained and able to manage anything that might arise.
That relief is its own quiet outcome. Carrie, whose daughter Melissa rarely misses a CVNQuinte Adventure weekend, has been looking for something like this for a long time. “There have not been any respite weekends or anything like this before,” she says. The weekends give her and her husband a rare stretch to reconnect and go on some outdoor adventures of their own. She describes “just taking that third person out and just let our guard down a little bit.” Kyra hears versions of this often. Families, she says, are coming home restored, and so are the people they support.
A positive pivot to meet surging demand
The service is not standing still. With demand outpacing space, the team is shifting toward a mobile model, running weekends out of rented homes across the region so participants can wake up somewhere new and meet people in smaller communities they might not otherwise reach. “Sometimes pivoting can be a very big positive for everybody,” Kyra says.
For now, there is a wait list of adults ready for the next adventure, and a growing circle of families, employees, and community partners who have seen what a weekend can do. As Max put it, when he wakes up in a house that is not his own and remembers where he is, he does not hesitate to embrace the adventure: ”I just get up and go.”
Inviting an investment in people
CVNQuinte Adventures runs on community support rather than ministry funding. The team welcomes financial donations, sponsorships, and in-kind gifts such as restaurant or activity coupons that help cover the cost of a weekend. Sponsorship options are wide-ranging, and they’re described here.
