Vacancy control bylaw passed in Vancouver City Council
December 2021 – Ongoing
In November/December Vacancy control in SROs passed through Vancouver City Council. The SRO Collaborative and other community partners, including Right To Remain, aided in the organizing and planning necessary to pass this bylaw. R2R tenant researchers wrote letters of support to council as well as gave moving speeches during the council hearing.
Watch the highlights of the speeches to council here
Help Win Rent Control in the DTES, Downtown Eastside Heart of the City Festival
November 2021
This year, we held a roundtable that included Norm Leech (Vancouver Aboriginal Community Policing Centre); tenants Tom deGrey, Nicole Baxter, Richard Schwab (Right to Remain Collective); Dr. Alexandra Flynn (UBC); Dr. Jeff Masuda (UVic – Right to Remain Collective); Emily Rogers (Together Against Poverty Society); Wendy Pedersen (DTES SRO Collaborative); and Tintin Yang (DTES Neighbourhood House)
The Right to Remain Documentary CBC Launch
August 2015
Award-winning documentary filmmaker Greg Masuda returns with The Right To Remain, a look at Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside residents and their fight to save the community from development.
The documentary is told from a Japanese-Canadian perspective and follows Tom who senses homelessness knocking at his door as rents skyrocket while the city lays out its development plans for the next 30 years,
“The Right To Remain is a culmination of my entire career as a filmmaker,” said Masuda.
—from CBC News, August 7, 2015
Watch the film here!
Revitalizing Japantown? exhibit at Nikkei National Museum
October 24, 2015 to January 31, 2016
This was a creative showcase of the trajectory of heritage and human rights in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. The exhibition offered an artistic perspective on the intricacies of forces and features that shaped the Downtown Eastside and were explored over the course of our three-year project.
See exhibit catalogue here.
Right to Remain Artist Team talk and ‘Pie Chats’
Saturday, November 28, 2015 from 2:00 – 5:00PM
This was an opportunity for attendees to view the exhibition, ask questions, and engage in conversation about the Downtown Eastside while enjoying homemade pie.
Labour Landscapes: A Storytelling Walk
Presented by The Right to Remain/Revitalizing Japantown? and Centre A, in association with Powell Street Festival Society, with support from Gallery Gachet
Saturday August 1, 2015, 2:00 – 4:00PM
This storytelling walk moved between past and present, through labour landscapes of the Downtown Eastside and Chinatown. Storytellers shared tales of intercultural presence, solidarity, and resistance. This walk was designed to re-claim, enliven, and connect some of the labour histories of the Downtown Eastside, those which have been erased from dominant histories, by the forces of colonization, racism, and gender and class prejudice.
The walk featured a variety of community voices, in order to capture the multiple perspectives which shape the place of the Downtown Eastside, including Audrey Kobayashi, Audrey Siegl, Doris Chow, Herb Varley, Jean Swanson, Kate Milberry, Lorene Oikawa, Naveen Girn, and Tom Delvecchio.
Right to Remain Exhibition: A Creative Repossession of the Human Rights Legacies of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside
March 6th to April 12th, 2015
This community-produced art exhibition celebrated the Downtown Eastside’s rich legacy of human rights struggle and achievement. It showcased artwork and documentation from a series of workshops guided by DTES artists who engaged their community in dialogue about human rights. Through “The Right to Remain” Community Fair, community organizations, artists, and researchers worked to reclaim and re-enliven the human rights history of the DTES to ensure that the rights of present-day inhabitants are prioritized and protected amidst rapid social and economic change.
The Right to Remain Community Fair was the second phase of the Revitalizing Japantown? research project.
Walk, Talk, Eat, Make: Wishes for the Downtown Eastside
Japanese Hall and Carnegie Centre
January 10th, 2015
Attended by over 50 Downtown Eastside residents and allies, members of the Japanese Canadian community, and anyone interested in the neighbourhood, participants began the day with a symbolic walk from this historic Japanese Hall, a mainstay of early 20th century Japanese-Canadian human rights activism, to the Carnegie Centre, an equally historic community centre that has been a long standing human rights bastion for the community. A workshop involving traditional Japanese Ema and fabrics, led by team member Kathy Shimizu with the support of Right to Remain Community Fair arts facilitators Karen Ward, Quin Martins, and Herb Varley, provided participants with the opportunity to express their human rights wishes for the neighbourhood and city.
New Funding Announced!
July 2015
We were pleased to announce that the legacy of the Right to Remain Community Fair was able to live on in the form of the Right to Remain Exhibitions, a curatorial project led by the Revitalizing Japantown? research team, with partners Gallery Gachet and the National Nikkei Museum.