Kimberly MacNeill

I have been quite the last little bit, but for good reason!
I might need a minute after finally receiving this today:

"Dear Kimberly,
Congratulations! Recreational therapists, activity professionals, and practitioners from a variety of professions can now learn in confidence knowing that National Council for Therapeutic Recreation Certification® (NCTRC®) has pre-approved your continuing education session content."

More to come! Launch date is August 1st 2026.

This spring I ran a resident wellness townhall using a Start, Stop, Continue format across all seven dimensions of wellness.
I was genuinely nervous about the Stop category.
Not a single stop came back.
What came back instead was a room full of residents dreaming out loud. Walking groups. A spelling bee league. A writing circle. More music. More lectures. More of everything already there.
They weren't criticizing. They were building.
Zero stops isn't luck. It's what happens when residents trust that their voice actually changes something.
I put together a free guide on exactly how to run this kind of townhall. No cost, no catch.
https://www.kimberlymacneill.ca/guidesandtoolkits/p/the-zero-stop-townhall-guide

This spring I ran a resident wellness townhall using a Start, Stop, Continue format across all seven dimensions of wellness.
I was genuinely nervous about the Stop category.
Not a single stop came back.
What came back instead was a room full of residents dreaming out loud. Walking groups. A spelling bee league. A writing circle. More music. More lectures. More of everything already there.
They weren't criticizing. They were building.
Zero stops isn't luck. It's what happens when residents trust that their voice actually changes something.
I put together a free guide on exactly how to run this kind of townhall. No cost, no catch.
https://www.kimberlymacneill.ca/guidesandtoolkits/p/the-zero-stop-townhall-guide

The signature event is the one your residents talk about for months afterward. The one families mention when they're deciding whether to move someone in. The one that ends up in the community newsletter and on the website and in the conversation at the dinner table when a resident calls her daughter on Sunday.
Most communities have one or two of these every year. The best ones didn't happen because someone had a great idea at the last minute. They happened because a wellness professional sat down with the chef, the GM, the care team, and a few residents who had opinions and actually built something together.
That collaboration is harder than it sounds. The chef has her own timeline and her own budget pressures. The care team has competing priorities. Leadership wants something impressive but isn't always sure what that means in practice. And the wellness professional is in the middle of all of it trying to hold a vision that nobody else can quite see yet.
The Signature Event Framework was built for exactly that moment. It walks you through the full planning process, the interdepartmental conversations, the resident input piece, the logistics, and the follow-through, so the event actually becomes what you imagined instead of a version of it that got watered down along the way. And when it comes together the way it's supposed to, your marketing team has something genuinely worth talking about.
kimberlymacneill.ca/guidesandtoolkits/p/the-signature-event-framework

The Signature Event Framework — Kimberly MacNeill A pre-event pitch guide covering how to bring the idea to your GM and each department leader individually, the question that converts a department head into a co-owner before planning starts, and a one-page event order covering all departments including F&B with menu and pricing fields, communic

So excited to be a part of this group!

Check out Kimberly MacNeill's New Membership Badge credential issued by Canadian Women's Chamber of Commerce (CanWCC) Follow this link to get more details about New Membership Badge credential issued by Canadian Women's Chamber of Commerce (CanWCC) to Kimberly MacNeill.

Leaving acute care for senior living was one of the hardest professional decisions I've ever made, not because I didn't want to go, but because I had to defend it to everyone around me. Colleagues, family, people who looked at me like I was stepping down from something real into something softer.
Wild, right?

Surgical care is about pushing people forward. You push them to walk the day after surgery when their body is screaming at them not to. You push them to eat, to move, to rebuild the strength they lost on the table. The entire job is getting someone capable enough to walk out the door and not come back, and you celebrate that discharge like a victory because it is one. Everything you do is oriented toward restoring capacity and trusting people to use it.

Walking into senior living and finding a system built around the opposite instinct was genuinely difficult for me to understand. Residents being managed instead of challenged, programming designed around what was familiar and safe rather than what people actually wanted or could handle, a quiet assumption woven through the whole culture that these people had arrived at the end of something and the job now was to keep them comfortable while they waited.
I couldn't reconcile any of it with everything I had practiced with my acute care patients. So, I brought the surgical floor with me. The belief that there's always a next level if someone is willing to try, that age is not a reason to expect less, that protecting people from challenge is not really supporting them.

Has anyone else made a pivot that surprised the people around them?

The best resident programs I've ever seen didn't start with a great idea from the wellness team.
They started with a great question: What do you know that nobody here knows yet. What have you done that you'd love to do again. What would make you feel like yourself inside these walls.
Resident-led programming isn't a philosophy, it's a practice, and it starts long before the calendar gets built.
What's a program in your community that came directly from a resident's idea? Share it below, I'd love to celebrate it. 👇

A study published in 2025 followed 8,000 older adults across three years looking for what predicted better memory outcomes.
The answer was belonging.
Not programming. Not activity attendance. The feeling of being known and mattering inside a community.
As you've heard me say again and again, we're measuring by the wrong ruler. We count seat counts and sign-up sheets. Belonging asks something different of us entirely.
This plays out everywhere. A resident comes in fairly withdrawn. Polite, present, but not really landing anywhere. Health is fine. Participating by every measure we have.
It's when she starts running one of the small group sessions that something shifts. She stops leaving early. She starts arriving before anyone else. Other residents begin asking for her specifically. She has somewhere that needs her.
That is a wellness win worth measuring.
kimberlymacneill.ca

The latest issue of The Senior Living Shift is out!
This one is the framework. All four pillars of The Intention Method, with some great stories behind them.
If you work in senior living recreation, wellness or otherwise and you've ever felt like you were building programming for people instead of with them, this issue is for you!

THE SENIOR LIVING SHIFT | ISSUE 02 There is a resident I think about often. She moved into our community quietly, the way some people do, keeping to herself, watching before she decided whether this place was worth her full presence.