Someone looking at the photos during the Hope in Shadows street vote on East Hastings. Photo credit: Pivol Legal Society
I’m apartment-sitting for a friend in downtown Vancouver this week. The restaurants are busy, people are enjoying the seawall, and shoppers are buying stuff . . . whether they can afford it or not. Life can be bliss in this part of the city.
Cross over right next door to East Hastings⎯it’s a completely different world. Many people are “afraid” or “creeped out” to even walk through the area in the daylight.
I’ve walked there plenty and helped out at the soup kitchen years ago. One of my high school teachers brings his students every year to give out blankets and winter gear every year. They’re fine. As I’ve said before, I’m much more likely to get molested in the clubbing area in downtown than poked with a heroin needle in the east side.
While big cities are progressive in many ways, I feel like city people are sheltered in other ways. After passing beautiful farmland around the U.S. and Europe the past year, I’ve seen how disconnected we are from our food and where our stuff comes from. This was a key point in Food Inc.
The stereotypical image of North American farm life is a burned white guy with a heavy accent. But the land, the areas, and the people are spectacular.
Like food issues, homelessness is another problem that is masked by our comforts and convenience. One of the strategies being implemented now to tackle this problem is to basically push them out of sight before the Olympics. When Miloon Kothari, the U.N.’s special reporter on adequate housing, examined the Downtown Eastside, he said, “Much more needs to be done, both as an emergency response and a longer-term response–more housing options for people, including more transitional housing and social housing.”
As I will continuously demonstrate, communication brings issues closer to home. Pivot Legal Society runs the Hope in Shadows project and it is a perfect example of how communication tactics can be used to engage people in social issues.
Pivot Legal Society’s mandate is to “take a strategic approach to social change, using the law to address the root causes that undermine the quality of life of those most on the margins.” The organization believes that everyone, regardless of income, benefits from a healthy and inclusive community where values such as opportunity, respect, and equality are strongly rooted in the law.
The Hope in Shadows project began in 2003 and it includes a photography contest for residents in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. It shows people an “on the ground” perspective of life in the eastside and the top three winners also get a cash prize.
Collecting street votes. Photo credit: Pivot Legal Society
A few weeks ago, I did a four-hour shift with a few other volunteers to collect street votes. Anyone passing by chose their top three pictures among the shortlisted pictures that were taken by people in the eastside.
During the shift, some of the pictures really grow on you. One of the most powerful images was the image of girl who was five or six years old sleeping in a box on the street.
The good majority of people who voted and spoke with us were strung out in the daytime. It’s unbelievable to see people in this state in such a prosperous city. They were still easy to talk to, responsive, and friendly.
Pivot printed 13,000 calendars for 2009 and it sold out in February. Anyone in the eastside could also sell calenders and they would get $10 for each one they sold. Overall the sellers made $130,000 for themselves.
The 2010 calendars will be available in the fall.
I realize it’s weird to say that these calendars bring issues closer to home because homeless people are everywhere in our communities. But I think this project does shed light because most people ignore the problem. Hope in Shadows is a way of showing people the realities of their daily environment.
One Pivot’s volunteers said the people in the Downtown Eastside “take pictures of what they see, through their lens, and share them with the world in the paper and on the news, to their friends and family.They say it is like this, and like that, and a lot of the time what they portray is negative, and what they show is just the surface.”
The hidden stories
I have a friend who makes a six figure salary now and his revenues continue to grow every year. He spoke about situations where his family could have gone under while he was growing up. He said, “poverty is not a life choice.” No one is really immune and a few strings of bad luck can send someone on the streets.
Everyone on the street has a story. Yes, I do think there are people who don’t want to get their act together and end up on the streets for bad choices. But it’s certainly not everyone.
A third of Canada’s homeless population (65,000 people), are youth.
I highly doubt they want to live on the streets if they could avoid it. Abuse and neglect are two of the major reasons why young people leave home. Several studies show that nearly 70% of homeless youth have experienced some form of sexual, physical, or emotional abuse.
Let’s be realistic.
If I lived on the streets, and day in and day out I could only survive from people’s charity, I’d likely resort to drugs to have some escape from that reality. The majority of society wouldn’t care about me even if I wanted to try and get a job. People would view me as “lazy” or think I’m “annoying” if I asked for change. What other escape would I have?
Also, about 30% of prostitution workers in Vancouver’s Eastside are survival sex workers. Your choices are limited when you are poor.
Poverty is not a life choice. And as the Salvation Army says, “Poverty should not be a life sentence.”
Pivot Legal Society shirt
For more information on homelessness, check out the following links:
- “Fix Homelessness? Pay $250 million”
- Raising the Roof
- “We all pay for poverty”
- Help the Homeless blog
