The HATS Manual -> The Program -> History

1992
St. Christopher House and Portuguese Women 55+ Support Group of Ontario (PW55+) join forces to achieve common objective of fighting abuse and neglect of older persons.

1996/97
Elder Abuse Peer Support Project addresses issues related to the abuse and neglect of older persons. The Project also strengthened the role of seniors in public education, and in peer supporting roles to seniors victims of abuse.

1997
Ripple Effect Festival in Toronto. At the Festival, the concept of the Theatre of the Oppressed was introduced. The St. Christopher House Elder Abuse Peer Support Project used the concept to develop their own Action Theatre technique based on this methodology.

1998-2000
Elder Abuse Awareness Project uses Action Theatre as a tool to promote elder abuse awareness. Seniors troupes performed before a number of groups throughout the province of Ontario.

1999
St. Christopher House receives an Innovation SHARE Award sponsored by the SmithKline Beecham and the University of Pennsylvania Institute on Aging for its HATS project. The award received was to continue and expand the use of the Action Theatre model for two years and apply it to health promotion in general.

2000/02
HATS troupes comprised of Portuguese- and Vietnamese-speaking St.Chris seniors performed in 55 presentations for over 3,300 participants. They created 27 different non-verbal short plays about seniors health and wellness topics such as heart health, nutrition, environment, gambling, substance abuse, fraud against seniors, caregiving, home and street safety, abuse and neglect of older persons and communication with health providers.

2002
HATS launches the website to introduce the HATS concept to other community service and health workers and seniors.