Victoria Liberation Front to Host Monthly Gatherings on Pandora Avenue

Today, a dozen unhoused residents of Pandora Avenue and advocates sat together on a patch of grass, for the purpose of long-term organising on the notorious Block.

Sorry to those who missed it because I called it on rather short notice—I’m getting a lot of flak about that right now. The attendance was a bit small and that’s just the way it needed to be though. I wanted a smaller group for the first iteration in order to give everyone a voice.

In fact, only one person showed up on time other than me, a lady who’s been living on the Block for years and is tired of getting targeted by Bylaw. I told that person I would hold this gathering even if it was just her and me. I held another such gathering before launching the Oaklands Park Residents Association, and likewise there were only two unhoused residents in attendance. The numbers don’t really matter at that stage.

Up until thirty minutes into the meeting, we were only four people, and three of us were advocates; the rest arrived late, and that’s just fine, there was no rush. In total there were seven unhoused and five advocates in attendance. It was, after all, an informal gathering with a very light agenda, and the conversation henceforth lasted only one hour.

I told these people why I had gathered them on behalf of the Victoria Liberation Front, which is likewise a very small network with just a few active members on our Discord server. I told them about my intention to organise disenfranchised people like the homeless and drug users, emulating the Downtown Eastside community in Vancouver which has been doing it for decades:

I also told them there were no action items today. I was going to pay the unhoused in attendance ten dollars each, because I valued their time like I valued their opinion. And for that first time, I wasn’t going to do the talking, they would. I wanted to forge a relationship between them and advocates, so I asked them to tell me about themselves. Where they come from. How they landed on the Block. What their daily ordeals were. What they needed to get off the streets. That’s it. And I listened for an hour.

You might think it was a waste of time and money. It wasn’t. Advocacy and organising require building a relationship with people, and for that we need to know each other. Today we’ve done what had already been done at Irving Park by Stop The Sweeps Victoria before the park closed, and what we’re currently doing at Oaklands Park, but nobody had bothered with on the Block since the Alto administration assumed office two years ago.

You want to organise people? You want them to follow your lead? Sit down with them and listen to them. Give them a voice. Empower them to fight their own battles, even using their modest means. This is the sense of community that the DTES has fostered for decades and which we lack. Perhaps thirty years from now it’ll be our turn to come up with a video documentary on how it started, and we’ll chronicle it from that first informal meeting of a dozen people sitting on a patch of grass by Save-on-Foods ranting about how we hate Bylaw.

As I mentioned, I intend to hold these meetings on a monthly basis—specifically on the last Sunday of each month. Starting next month there will be action items, and we’ll discuss in depth ideas that unhoused people in attendance brought forward, such as starting a mutual aid forum to supplement outreach and advocacy networks. As a strategist, I’ll enable these folks to implement their own ideas instead of continually forcing mine unto them. And yeah, I’ll call it a bit sooner next time—just a bit.