Keenan Wellar

Keenan Wellar (born 1968, in Evanston, Illinois) is the originator and co-founder of the LiveWorkPlay self-advocacy organization (established in 1995) for people with intellectual disabilities based in Ottawa, Canada. He is currently serving as the CEO and has public visibility as a [http://liveworkplay.ca/OLDSITE/LWP/med.html media spokesperson] .

Trained as an educator at the University of Ottawa and a graduate of the applied linguistics Master of Arts program at Carleton University he managed the national Special Needs Education project (part of the Government of Canada's SchoolNet program) from 1995-1997 as a Project Manager at Ingenia Communications Corporation and represented Canada at the [http://www.isoc.org/inet97/siteindex.html Seventh Annual Conference of the Internet Society] .

In 1997 Keenan Wellar and his wife [http://liveworkplay.ca/OLDSITE/LWP/julie.html Julie Kingstone] left their existing careers to work full-time on growing the LiveWorkPlay organization, which they had established on a voluntary basis in 1995, at which time it operated as the Special Needs Network.

Wellar and Kingstone also helped found Heartwood House, an umbrella charity for 16 non-profit organizations in Ottawa. Mr. Wellar was [http://heartwoodhouse.ca/content/view/14/28/ elected chair of the board] for Heartwood House in 2007.