Fun Guide follies

If you are a fairly fit, active senior who wants to stay that way, you probably have a date in early August marked in your calendar. That’s when the Parks Forestry and Recreation (PFR) Fun Guides get posted online, and you can start planning your fall and winter activities. When we were younger, many of us thought of the Fun Guides as one-stop shopping for fitness and recreation, but now that we’re seniors, how well do they stack up?

Suppose you have osteoporosis and want to find an osteo fitness class. PFR lets you search for programs by entering terms in a search box, but no matter how you word it – osteo fit, osteo fitness, osteofitness, bone – you get no hits. You can try drilling down through the listings instead, so you click on Fitness, and then what? Is it under Cardio? Muscle conditioning? Other? I eventually found it under Cardio – Older Adult. But if you don’t want to play guessing games, you may as well just download the Older Adult brochure for your district and scroll through until you find listings for what they call Osteo Fit. You’ll find some classes, but they’re pretty unevenly distributed. Lots of choice if you live in Etobicoke or Scarborough, but there’s only one location for all of North York, and three for Toronto / East York. If the locations or times aren’t convenient, what do you do now?

It turns out that there are lots of organizations that provide fitness, recreational and other programming for seniors, but aren’t listed in the Fun Guides, because they aren’t funded by PFR. Consider these:

• Partially funded community centres. These ten community centres get some of their funding from the city, but not through PFR, and have to raise the rest themselves. Most of them have senior programs. Unlike the community centres in the Fun Guides, these have their own websites. You can find the list here.
• Neighbourhood centres. These organizations try to build strong communities and promote social participation and inclusiveness. Seniors are a vulnerable group, so these centres offer programming for us. You can see the list of them here.
• Community health centres. They take a broad view of health, looking at the social, economic and environmental factors that affect how healthy we are. So their senior programs include fitness and social activities, as well as health promotion and education and more. You can find a local one here.
• Senior centres, of course. Actually, PFR runs seven senior centres, six in Etobicoke and one in Scarborough, so they’re in the Fun Guides, but most senior centres get their funding elsewhere. It’s tricky trying to get a list of the Toronto senior centres. The best way I could find is by going through the resource lists for the Local Health Integration Networks (LHINs). Torontonians might belong to any of five LHINs, so first find your LHIN, then click Seniors and then Seniors’ centres. These listings are maintained by a not-for-profit organization; it’s not a paid advertising directory. It’s pretty thorough, too.

Got a headache yet? Feeling a little dizzy? Frustrated? Exasperated? Well, there’s a cure for that. Come on over to Senior Toronto. In the site search box, type “osteo fitness” (without the quotes). Check out the 25 hits. Seven of them are not in the Fun Guides: two partially-funded community centres, one neighbourhood centre, one community health centre and three senior centres. Piece of cake. Senior Toronto is your one-stop shop.