Organizing Community Thriving

Sunday, January 26, 2025

It has been six months since we moved to Surrey from Osaka. In that time we have explored our neighbourhood, the kids have gotten used to school, and I have re-connected with friends and family, and made a ton of new connections.

We lived in Kelowna for 8 years, which is plenty of time to build up our community network, including things like Digital Okanagan, Okanagan Developers Group, Kelowna Japanese Language Society, and Okanagan Asian Heritage Month committee, among others. For the past few months I have been looking for my communities here in Metro Vancouver. Although I have found a bunch, I think there is a lot more out there. Being much larger than Kelowna, there isn’t a single place you can go to get connected. Thus I have been conducting a lot of shuttle diplomacy by meeting people all over: Vancouver, UBC, Burnaby, Surrey, and even Fort Langley out in the Fraser Valley!

Coming out of the pandemic there is certainly a thirst for more in-person connection, and to build back better. The pandemic tore up a lot of the social fabric here, which also had the effect of exposing a lot of the rot in our underlying systems. In this way, the pandemic, and the reaction to it, are like a sequel to the economic crisis of 2008-9. The dissatisfaction with “how things are” has triggered a wave of grassroots organizing of people who want to make things better. These are my people. My goal is to find them and join them, to add my shoulder to the wheel, to help raise the barn of community.

These people exist across many different domains: tech, arts and culture, economic and social justice, politics, etc. A common theme I hear in speaking to people in these different verticals is a desire for thriving. What that word means can mean different things to different groups, but I have found with the various groups I have met that people have a sense that “something can be done here!”, of potential to make things “better”. There is an energy, and I have learned it is not just in a single group.

So I have been going out and trying to meet different groups, to potentially build bridges between them, looking for opportunities for collaboration and coalitions. Metro Van is much larger than the Okanagan where we were able to build some truly amazing community in the 8 years I was there. Here there is lots more going on, but it is also much easier to work in isolation with other groups. The big city affords anonymity, which can be positive but also a negative. However, as someone I met recently said, “Vancouver is too small for us to not know what one another is doing.”

Z-Space has been great for meeting new people. It is a hub for arts and tech in downtown Vancouver. Not only do I co-work there once a week, we run all sorts of meetups and events there (including the recent #LoFiWKND). Z-Space is an excellent example of how third spaces engender community building. back in Kelowna we had CoLab, our old Rocketlaunch space, and the Accelerate Okanagan government-run accelerator. I recently ran an event in Seattle at the Internet Development Studio offices, which are turning into a cool hub in the Pike Place Market area. V2 House, from the V2 community trying to build economic and cultural thriving for young people in Vancouver, is another example. I want to find more of these “club houses” and map them all out to make it easier for people to connect, whether they have lived here all their lives and just didn’t realize, or are new arrivals like me. If you know some, let me know!

There is much more cooking that I haven’t mentioned, but let me give you a couple more examples:

That is just a handful of what I expect to be heaps of mutual aid and solarpunk and utopian activators out there pushing for agency and opportunity and justice. I want to know more, and am actively on the lookout for people who are looking to make Metro Vancouver thrive. If you know of a group or a person, comment below, contact me on any of my networks, or email me!

I will close with an inspiring passage from the writer Kristen Ghodsee who was on a podcast talking about her book Everyday Utopia: What 2,000 Years of Bold Experiments Can Teach Us About the Good Life:

And they’re so important to the history of humanity. That was the one thing that just became so clear to me as I was researching this book, how so much human progress, so many of the things that we take for granted in the world today are the result of these radical social dreamers on the very fringes of our societies. I like to call them The Other 1%. So we have a 1% that’s the economic 1%, which is a statistical artifact of if you have 100% of the distribution of wealth, there’s always going to be a 1% that’s at the top. But the Utopian 1% is this group of people who have always been on the margins of our societies. They’ve always been out there dreaming up different ways of living and not only dreaming them up, but also trying to make them a reality. And it’s in these communities, many of which are just really crazy when you start to read about them, what they were trying to do and how they were organizing themselves and the massive Amounts of resistance that they faced. It’s in these communities from these communities that we begin to find our way forward through many historical challenges. And I would argue when I say in the book that they’re necessary for our survival, I think that the fundamental flexibility and creativity and adaptability of humanity, and we know that we are as a species incredibly flexible and adaptable and creative, that it comes and it has always come from this small percentage of the population that thinks differently about the way we should be living our lives.

Let’s connect up the Other 1% and organize community thriving together.

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Long form