Recommended Resources
Here is a collection of articles, reports, organizations, university departments and more that involve innovative community engagement practices. We aim to foster learning exchanges with partners and colleagues locally and globally.
Included in these resources are recommendations from, and works by, Below the Radar guests, as well as selected press articles covering the activities of SFU’s Vancity Office of Community Engagement and our partners.
221A Gallery
221A works with artists and designers to research and develop social, cultural and ecological infrastructure.
Aboriginal Life in Vancouver Enhancement Society (ALIVE)
ALIVE Society exists to promote, enhance and foster the social, economic, and cultural well-being and health of Aboriginal peoples in Vancouver. ALIVE creates opportunities for urban Aboriginals in the city of Vancouver to fully engage as citizens in their neighbourhoods and in the city as a whole.
Access to Media Education Society
AMES is a small but powerful organization in the Salish Sea. Our programs create equity-oriented, youth-centred spaces that support creative reflection, critical dialogue, and personal and social transformation.
Art & Education
Art & Education is a publishing platform from e-flux and Artforum focusing on education and contemporary art. Since 2004, it has been a singular resource for information about the most important exhibitions, programs, and events in education worldwide.
Arts Everywhere
Musagetes established ArtsEverywhere as a creative space unlike any other—to create a site that covers a breadth of artistic and creative practices as they relate to social justice and human rights. Our stories have a life, a reach, an impact beyond their immediate context.
Ashoka Canada
With our visionary partners we are illuminating solutions, supporting high-impact changemakers and seeding a new generation of change leaders. We welcome your best self here.
BC Civil Liberties Association
CCLA is a human rights organization committed to defending the rights, dignity, safety, and freedoms of all people in Canada. As was established in the organisation’s founding principles, CCLA is the pre-eminent voice advocating for the rights and freedoms of all Canadians and all persons living in Canada.
BC Co-op Association
The BC Co-op Association (BCCA) is the knowledge and resource centre for co-ops in BC, where co-ops and credit unions come together to collaborate, network, get support, learn, and contribute knowledge to shape BC’s co-op movement.
BC Poverty Reduction Coalition
The BC Poverty Reduction Coalition is comprised of over 100 organizations and community mobilizations that come together to advocate for public policy solutions to end poverty, homelessness and inequality in B.C.
BRIC
We are a leading arts and media institution anchored in Downtown Brooklyn whose work spans contemporary visual and performing arts, media, and civic action. For over forty years, our institution has shaped Brooklyn's cultural and media landscape by presenting and incubating artists, creators, students, and media makers.
Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives-BC
The BC Office works with a team of over fifty staff and volunteer researchers to investigate the key challenges facing our province — the high rate of poverty, economic insecurity, the extreme concentration of wealth and threats to our environment and climate.
Canadian Drug Policy Coalition
The Canadian Drug Policy Coalition is comprised of over 50 organizations and 6,000 individuals working to support the development of a drug policy for Canada that is based in science, guided by public health principles, is respectful of the human rights of all, and seeks to include people who use drugs and those harmed by the war on drugs in moving towards a healthier Canadian society.
Canadian Urban Institute
We are the national platform that houses the best in Canadian city building – where policymakers, urban professionals, civic and business leaders, community activists and academics can learn, share and collaborate with one another from coast to coast to coast.
City Studio Vancouver
CityStudio Vancouver is an innovation hub that brings together city staff, students, faculty and community to co-create experimental projects that make Vancouver more sustainable, liveable, joyful, and inclusive.
CJSF 90.1 FM
CJSF broadcasts from the Burnaby mountain campus of Simon Fraser University at 90.1 FM to most of Greater Vancouver, from Langley to Point Grey and from the North Shore to the US Border, through MP3 streaming and through a speaker located just outside the station.
Community Scholars Program
In partnership with Vancouver Island University, the University of Northern British Columbia, Kwantlen Polytechnic University, and the University of British Columbia, the Simon Fraser University Library coordinates a program to provide staff of charitable and non-profit organizations in British Columbia with access to the latest research and knowledge in their fields.
Concordia University Community Engagement
The Office of Community Engagement (OCE)'s mandate is to develop and support meaningful and mutually-beneficial relationships between the university and the diverse communities of Montreal.
Creative Time
Creative Time is a public arts organization that works with artists to contribute to the dialogues, debates, and dreams of our times.
Culture Saves Lives
PHS works with Indigenous harm reduction leaders in a movement called Culture Saves Lives to address the needs for cultural and spiritual care, reconnecting or helping people to connect for the first time to traditional, spiritual and cultural practices.
Daniels Spectrum
“Rooted in Regent Park, Open to the World,” Daniels Spectrum is home to many outstanding arts-based and community-focused organizations that make Daniels Spectrum a special place to work, play, study and get creative.
Dogwood BC
Named after B.C.’s provincial flower, Dogwood is a people-powered organization driven by a shared love of place. We bring together voters from all over the political spectrum to work on the urgent challenges facing our home.
Downtown Eastside Women’s Centre
The mission of the Downtown Eastside Women’s Centre is to provide a safe, non-judgmental environment for women from all walks of life, who live and/or work in the Downtown Eastside.
DTES SRO Collaborative Society
The SRO Collaborative was established to organize SRO tenants in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside and Chinatown.
DTES Street Market
The market supports hundreds of community members by allowing them to have a safe space to vend and supplement their incomes. The DTES market is an exciting place, loved by many, and has become a fixture of the neighbourhood.
East Van Roasters
East Van Roasters (319 Carrall Street in the Rainier Hotel) is a 16-seat specialty cafe and social enterprise Community Contribution Company. EVR is committed to encouraging women that are re-entering the work-force through mentorship based programming and on the job training.
e-Brain Lab
We are a team of translational scientists and research trainees with backgrounds in biomedical engineering, computer science, neuroscience and from time-to-time even entrepreneurship, creating innovative solutions to address real societal needs.
Embark
Embark seeks to achieve a just and sustainable future through social and systemic change. The theory of change is Embark’s strategic plan for 2021-2024 guided by our vision of a just, equitable, and sustainable future for all students. Our approach to sustainability advocacy can be broken down into two focus areas: Food Justice and Climate Equity.
Enterprising Women Making Art
EWMA was launched in 2003 as a development initiative of Atira Women’s Resource Society. It has focused on supporting women in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside to work together to develop an alternative form of business or employment that is grounded in their needs and realities.
Environmental Youth Alliance
The Environmental Youth Alliance is a registered charity supporting BIPOC youth to connect with nature, community, and skills to become environmental stewards and community leaders. We provide free land-based education and paid employment-training programs in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside.
Equitas
Equitas advances equality, social justice and respect for human dignity through transformative human rights education programs in Canada and around the world.
Ethọ́s Lab
Ethọ́s Lab is creating a STEM and culture-focused Innovation Academy (Akademie) for youth ages 13-18 to incite curiosity, build community, and promote personal growth and development in a rapidly changing world.
Evergreen
Evergreen is working to create cities that are livable, green and prosperous. For 30 years, we’ve been facilitating change in communities through connection, innovation and sustainable actions.
Foundations for Social Change
Foundations for Social Change is a Vancouver-based charitable organization that develops innovative programs helping vulnerable populations in our communities.
Gallery Gachet
Gallery Gachet is a unique artist-run centre located in the Downtown Eastside neighbourhood of Vancouver. Gallery Gachet is a collectively-run exhibition and studio space built to empower participants as artists, administrators and curators.
HAVE Culinary Training Society
HAVE Culinary Training Society is a culinary training school that provides food service job training and work opportunities to individuals in Vancouver who experience barriers to employment. HAVE students are youth and adults facing mental and physical disabilities, poverty, addiction and homelessness.
HUB Cycling
HUB Cycling is a charitable not-for-profit organization that has spent over 20 years removing barriers to cycling in Metro Vancouver, while cultivating the health, environmental, and economic benefits that active transportation can bring.
ICI Berlin
The ICI Berlin is an independent research centre dedicated to exploring how diverse cultures can be brought into productive confrontation.
Imagining America
The Imagining America consortium (IA) brings together scholars, artists, designers, humanists, and organizers to imagine, study, and enact a more just and liberatory ‘America’ and world. Working across divides, IA strengthens and promotes public scholarship, cultural organizing, and campus change.
International Centre of Art for Social Change
ICASC's goal is to support community-engaged art/ art for social change communities mainly in Canada, but also around the world. Artists, community-engaged arts practitioners and scholars, express strongly-felt needs for focused training, national and international networking, professional development, and for research and archival work.
Love Intersections
Love Intersections is a media arts collective made up of queer artists of colour dedicated to using collaborative art-making and relational storytelling to address systemic racism in our communities. We produce intersectional and intergenerational stories from underrepresented communities of colour.
Megaphone Speakers Bureau
Megaphone’s Speakers Bureau is a public awareness program connecting audiences with speakers who have lived experience of drug use and overdose prevention.
Nahanee Creative
Catalyzing social change to transform colonial narratives & impacts with workshop facilitation, transformative organizational development, decolonizing workbooks & communication design grounded in Squamish Matriarchy.
Out in Schools
Out In Schools is BC’s award-winning 2SLGBTQIA+ education program. We use film and facilitated group discussion to engage youth in building safer, more inclusive communities.
Overdose Prevention Society
We are a highly innovative & collective solution to many issues in community health. Our peer-based services are beneficial to the health authority; to the community; & to the participants themselves & ensure excluded, vulnerable & marginalized people to access to health & welfare services.
Pigeon Park Savings
Pigeon Park Savings is a unique collaboration between Vancity credit union and PHS. It provides access to basic financial services to people living on low incomes in the Downtown Eastside.
Pivot Legal Society
At Pivot, we believe that poverty and social exclusion are not inevitable. We have worked in partnership with marginalized people and grassroots organizations to challenge legislation, policies, and practices that undermine human rights, intensify poverty, and perpetuate stigma.
Plan Institute
Plan Institute is a nonprofit that works to improve the lives of people with disabilities by collaborating on community-based projects, offering a suite of learning initiatives, and advocating for policy reform.
Potluck Café
An award–winning social enterprise, Potluck Café & Catering, is a thriving business that employs neighbourhood residents. We are proud to be both a leader and collaborator in a movement that uses training and employment as a dignified means of helping people regain their confidence, skills, and economic independence.
Powell Street Festival Society
The Powell Street Festival Society’s (PSFS) mission is to cultivate Japanese Canadian arts and culture to connect communities. Our main activity is producing the Powell Street Festival (PSF) in Vancouver’s historic Japanese Canadian neighbourhood, Paueru Gai.
RADIUS SFU
RADIUS SFU is a social innovation hub that believes in an economy that works for everyone. To enact social change, we nurture radical ideas into useful solutions. Along the way, we learn by doing, and equip aspiring changemakers to drive economic transformation.
Scholarly Communications Lab
The ScholCommLab is an interdisciplinary team of researchers based in Vancouver and Ottawa, interested in all aspects of scholarly communication. We explore a wide range of questions using a combination of computational techniques, and traditional qualitative methods to investigate how knowledge is produced, disseminated, and used.
SFU Labour Studies
The world of work is changing. At the heart of Labour Studies is a commitment to the experiences of working people and their organizations, and to a more equal society
SFU Surrey - TD Community Engagement Centre
The SFU Surrey – TD Community Engagement Centre as a place-based entity provides an opportunity for SFU to connect with people and organizations in Surrey in a genuine way through collaboration, the sharing of resources and the co-creation of ideas and solutions to build more resilient communities.
SFU Sustainability Office
SFU’s Sustainability Office supports the university to develop and implement sustainability plans and policies; leads campus-wide signature sustainability projects towards SFU’s sustainability goals; and provides best practice services to scale student, faculty & staff sustainability initiatives across the institution.
Single Mothers’ Alliance
The Single Mothers' Alliance for Gender & Economic Justice is a anti-poverty community based non-profit created and organized by lone-mothers for lone-mothers in BC. We are a pan-provincial alliance of cis-gendered, trans and two-spirit lone-mother members raising their children in communities large and small throughout the province.
Skwachàys Lodge
Skwachàys Lodge is Canada’s first Indigenous Arts Hotel and has diligently worked to provide guests with first-class services and a platform to showcase local Indigenous art and culture. We are a social enterprise that provides the funding for 24 living & work studios for the “Artist in Residence” program in our building.
Sole Food
Sole Food Street Farms has transformed acres of vacant and contaminated urban land into street farms that grow artisan-quality fruits and vegetables. By providing jobs, agricultural training, and inclusion in a community of farmers and food lovers, the Sole Food project has empowered dozens of individuals with limited resources who are managing addiction and chronic mental health problems.
Solid State Community Industries
Solid State was established to address the economic immobilities of racialized migrant youth. After years of research and consultation, we are building a network of supporters, advisors, collaborating organizations, participants and their families to continue to develop this project.
Station 20 West
Station 20 West is a Community Enterprise Centre in the heart of Saskatoon’s west-side core neighbourhoods. We make a significant contribution to social, health, education and economic equality in core neighbourhoods.
Strathcona Community Dental Clinic
Strathcona Health Society is a charitable non-profit society that operates Strathcona Community Dental Clinic. The clinic provides quality dental services to low-income families, and is focused on providing dental services to children in the inner city of Vancouver.
Substantial Motion Research Network
We are an international research network for scholars and practitioners interested in cross-cultural exploration of media art and philosophy. We come together around shared interests in media archaeology, the migration of Islamic aesthetics, international contemporary art, and more.
Supporting Transparent and Open Research Engagement and Exchange (STOREE)
We aim to build pathways and systems for improved communication about research — from making academic materials available to community members and non-profit organizations, to examining new and improved ways to exchange knowledge among academic and non-academic communities.
Tamarack Institute for Community Engagement
The Tamarack Institute develops and supports collaborative strategies that engage citizens and institutions to solve major community issues across Canada and beyond.
Tayybeh, a social enterprise and food venture, is dedicated to bringing you a unique dining experience brought to you through the talents of our amazing newcomer Syrian women chefs. Tayybeh's mission is to empower newcomer Syrian women chefs while highlighting their delicious, healthy, and unique Syrian fare.
The Shift
THE SHIFT recognizes housing as a human right, not a commodity or an extractive industry. The Shift restores the understanding of housing as home, challenging the ways financial actors undermine the right to housing.
The York University - TD Community Engagement Centre
The York University-TD Community Engagement Centre strives for academic innovation through community building and experiential learning, post-secondary attainment for Black Creek Community, and fosters collaborative research and partnerships.
UNIT/PITT Society for Art & Critical Awareness
UNIT/PITT Society for Art and Critical Awareness is a charitable non-profit artist-run organization that supports art and critical awareness by offering the tools, space, resources, and mentorship for emerging artists and members of our neighbouring Chinatown and Downtown Eastside communities.
Urban Subjects
Urban Subjects is a cultural research collective based in Vancouver, Canada and Vienna, Austria. Together we develop interdisciplinary artistic projects focusing on global-urban issues, the texture of cities, and on civic imaginations. Urban Subjects do not work on a consensus model.
Vancity
Vancity is a values-based financial co‑operative serving the needs of its member-owners & their communities in the Coast Salish and Kwakwaka'wakw territories. We are a democratically controlled enterprise that supports the common economic, social, and cultural needs of its members & community.
Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users (VANDU)
VANDU is a group of users and former users who work to improve the lives of people who use drugs through user-based peer support and education. VANDU is committed to increasing the capacity of people who use drugs to live healthy, productive lives.
Vancouver Institute for Social Research
The Vancouver Institute for Social Research (VISR) is an independent, para-academic, theory-based free school which began in 2012. Our intent is to move beyond the borders of the traditional university and to open up a more accessible platform in the city for the engaged discussion of critical theory.
Vancouver Just Recovery
The Vancouver Just Recovery Coalition is calling on the City of Vancouver to prioritize lessening existing inequalities, respecting Indigenous rights, and tackling the climate emergency. We believe socially just strategies to recover and rebuild post-COVID-19 will better support vulnerable communities, and make a safer, healthier city for all.
Vancouver Moving Theatre
Vancouver Moving Theatre creates art that celebrates the power of the human spirit; builds shared experiences that bridges cultural traditions, social groups and artistic disciplines; and gives voice to residents of the Downtown Eastside and beyond.
Vancouver Podcast Festival
The Vancouver Podcast Festival is dedicated to highlighting the power and potential of podcasts, and bringing together local podcast creators with national and international series. The festival aims to foster new podcast creation in British Columbia and Canada, and bring new audiences to podcasting.
Vera List Center for Art and Politics
The Vera List Center for Art and Politics is a research center and a public forum for art, culture, & politics. We are a nonprofit that serves a critical mission: to foster a vibrant and diverse community of artists, scholars, & policymakers who take creative, intellectual, and political risks to bring about positive change.
WePress
The mission of WePress is to advance education by providing workshops on historic and contemporary methods of print- and art-making for the public, with a particular focus on individuals from marginalized communities in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside (DTES).
WISH Drop-In Centre Society
WISH works to improve the health, safety and well-being of women who are involved in Vancouver’s street-based sex trade. Our vision is for every woman to have access to opportunities to make free, healthy and positive choices.
Yerba Buena Center for the Arts
Our work spans the realms of contemporary art, performance, film, civic engagement, and public life. By centering artists as essential to social and cultural movement, YBCA is reimagining the role an arts institution can play in the community it serves.