Updates

Between October 30th to November 10th this year, the 21st annual Heart of the City festival animated the Downtown Eastside with over a hundred community-oriented events under the theme Threads of Connection.

The release of States of Injury — with Wendy Brown marks Below the Radar’s 250th episode—a major milestone since the podcast’s inception in 2018.

On June 22, the cast and crew of Project Limelight’s production of East Side Story were greeted with applause as a full house welcomed the young performers back to the Fei and Milton Wong Experimental Theatre stage.

Our Below the Radar podcast mini-series See How We Run! looked at local arts collectives and organizations, highlighting conversations about creation, spacemaking, accessibility, and self-determination within the framework of Vancouver’s cityscape.

With details of our 5-year anniversary celebration event to come, let’s take a sneak peek of the upcoming season.

Since September 2022, we’ve held 42 events and workshops, released 33 episodes, and engaged more than 25,000 podcast listeners. During that time, working diligently behind the scenes—editing podcast audio, and supporting communications and events programming—was our interim Programs Assistant Samantha Walters, who we are pleased to announce has now moved into a continuing role in the office.

On our latest spring season of the podcast, we had the chance to sit down with five SCA artist-scholars for some exciting discussions on their artistic practices and latest research. Whether you're looking to hear more about arts education and the local arts ecology, or just seeking some artistic inspiration, we hope you join us in diving back into these episodes.

Our spring season of Below the Radar has consisted of seventeen conversations with community builders, artists, and academics about dynamic research initiatives, new projects, and engaging stories.

As we approach our 5th year of Below the Radar, we’re pleased to share that our podcast has surpassed 100,000 listens!

The 2023 Spring season has already kicked off with four episodes that explore varying topics from racial justice, community building, colonialism, and regional storytelling.

In Below the Radar’s The Climate Imaginary series we touched on disinformation, links between the arts and climate activism, and the challenges in making real environmental change.

SFU’s Vancity Office of Community Engagement was honoured to support four events at the Downtown Eastside Heart of the City Festival, featuring activists, performance artists, and a comic journalist, telling their stories and illuminating directions for positive change.

We are delighted to welcome our newest co-op student Alex Masse, who has been diligently working behind the scenes with us at SFU’s Vancity Office of Community Engagement (SFU VOCE) since January.

Visual arts students on the SFU VOCE team reflect on making art for a distanced audience and how gallery experiences will continue to change as we slowly emerge from the pandemic.

As The Power of Disability podcast series comes to a close, we are looking back on the series, recounting its beginnings, and encapsulating the insights of each guest. Host Al Etmanski spoke with six guests with disabilities who have been key forces of change — in arts, activism, policy change, and many other sites of social transformation and innovation.

It’s our pleasure to introduce an important member of our team who is hard at work behind the scenes of Below the Radar, Kathy Feng.

Our longtime community partner Karen Jamieson Dance has returned with the Carnegie Dance Troupe to present their work in progress performance Recollect. This year’s collaborative performance was lead by Julie Lebel, a choreographer with a wide breadth of experience with community engaged dance.

From everyone here at SFU’s Vancity Office of Community Engagement, we’d like to celebrate Indigenous History Month. We want to highlight some of the Indigenous thinkers, academics, and artists we’ve had the opportunity to work with this year through both our podcast Below the Radar and our public programming.

Visual artist and photographer Anne Marie Slater shared her recent 2019 Artist Residency with the Victoria Square Project {Artist Rick Lowe (USA) Documenta 14 in collaboration with Artist, Maria Papadimitriou (GR)} in Athens, Greece in a workshop at SFU Woodward’s entitled Intersections, Athens. The workshop highlighted the place based context of social practice that considers people and context.

It’s that time of year again! Back for their 16th year, Heart of the City Festival will fill the Downtown Eastside with song, drama, visual art, film, workshops, and so much more. With over 100 events at over 40 venues throughout the Downtown Eastside, the 12 days between Wednesday, October 30 and Sunday, November 10 are sure to inspire and delight you. Many of these events are free or by suggested donation.

We are partnering again with Reel Causes for their upcoming event #Indigeneity, which will showcase Indigenous films that address pressing contemporary Indigenous issues here in Canada and around the world.

We sat down to talk with the brilliant minds behind the New(to)Town Collective. Their goal? To provide accessible, experimental workshops (Training Jams) and to cross-pollinate amongst communities in and out of Vancouver. A few of its founders — Anjela Magpantay, Davey Calderon, and Avyen von Waldenburg — told us about the work they do in the community, how they came to be, and where they plan to go.

Germaine Tremmel visited SFU on October 29, 2017 to present on the Importance of Cultural Identity for Women and the Rise of Women Warriors. A grandmother who worked to initiate the movement at Standing Rock to oppose the Dakota Access Pipeline, Tremmel is a lawyer and activist seeking to protect the rights and freedoms of Indigenous peoples. Her presentation focused on recognizing the importance of women within our communities, emphasizing the power women have within themselves.

Bringing together cultural traditions from across the world, the unique collaboration between Tzo’kam and Sawagi Taiko performed at SFU’s Vancouver campus for the third time as a part of the Downtown Eastside Heart of the City Festival. The theme of this year’s festival was Honouring the Women of the Downtown Eastside.

On May 18, the Salish Singing and Drumming Workshop series of Spring 2017 came to a close. The monthly workshops are led each Spring and Fall by award-winning composer, producer, and traditional Lil’wat singer, Russell Wallace.

Simon Fraser University hosted the C²UExpo 2017 from May 1 to 5 — a conference featuring collaborations and relationships between academic and community parnters. The Community and Cultural Mash-Up reception was a special event on the evening of May 3 for C²UExpo participants, featuring some of SFU’s cultural and community partners.

A compilation of works from the students of the Fall 2016 session of Community Journalism 101.

Award-winning graphic journalist Joe Sacco was at SFU on November 2, 2016, for an engaging evening in conversation with Chris Brayshaw from Pulp Fiction Books, filmmaker Sobhi Al-Zobaidi, Broken Pencil editor Alison Lang, and Roxanne Panchasi from SFU’s History Department.

Canada’s largest festival of zines and underground culture is coming to Vancouver this Saturday, November 5. Canzine West 2016 is open to the public from 1:00-7:00 pm at the SFU Woodward’s campus (149 W Hastings). This long-running festival first opened in Toronto in 1995 and has been a huge outlet of underground culture ever since.

How does the city orchestrate a set of quiet, everyday choreographies? How are dance artists refiguring these mobile arrangements? How does the project of choreography — of directing bodies — resonate with broader ethical concerns about moving and being moved?

This year marks the 13th Annual Downtown Eastside Heart of the City Festival! SFU’s Vancity Office of Community Engagement is thrilled to welcome the festival back into our space for a variety of different events.

This summer, SFU’s Vancity Office of Community Engagement partnered with the S.U.C.C.E.S.S. Moving Ahead Program (MAP) to deliver a series of photography workshops to young Syrian children who recently arrived in Vancouver as refugees.

For a Muse of Fire brought humour and heart to SFU Woodward’s last week. Staged on July 18, the story takes place on the number 20 bus, inspired by lived experiences of community members of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside and a little bit of Shakespeare.

This week, SFU’s Vancity Office of Community Engagement said goodbye to one of the most instrumental and valued members of our team. Program assistant Andrea Creamer spoke to communications assistant Melissa Roach and community engagement specialist Samaah Jaffer in reflection on her experience over the past five years.

Ghoulish lanterns lit the way to the Powell Street Festival Society‘s annual collaborative performance event, Spatial Poetics XV. The event saw its 15th anniversary this year, bringing together a diverse mix of Japanese-Canadian artists under the theme of ghost stories.

Watch the magic unfold on the Fei & Milton Wong Experimental Theatre stage as Project Limelight mounts its production for #FAIRYTALE.

February 11, 2016, marked the first session of our Woodward’s Community Singers 2016 Workshops. The workshops take place every Thursday from 6:00 PM to 7:30 PM in the Sky Room of the PHS Community Services Residences at the Woodward’s complex.

An adaptation of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, Bah! Humbug! revives the classic holiday tale about giving, sincerity, redemption and forgiveness, set in modern-day Vancouver.

SFU’s Vancity Office of Community Engagement is pleased to be supporting three free film screenings at SFU in partnership with DOXA Documentary Film Festival during this year’s PuSH International Performing Arts Festival.