For nearly 30 years now, the Metro Vancouver Alliance (MVA), an alliance of faith, non-profit, educational institutions and union groups situated across the Lower Mainland, has played a pivotal and continuing role in ensuring that those whom government and our society has let down and made vulnerable have a loud and clarion voice in helping set policy to redress the societal wrongs that inhibit their full participation in the life of the society.

In the 1990s, the group who would come to form the Metro Vancouver Alliance almost two decades later were comprised of various members of the faith and union communities across the metro Vancouver region, who came together, informally, to fight for change and social justice.

As you’ll hear tomorrow in an interview VanRamblings conducted with recent, and now retired, Metro Vancouver Alliance organizer, Deborah Littman, in point of fact, the genesis of what would become the Metro Vancouver Alliance did not begin to occur in earnest until 2009, with work continuing on through 2013, when as you’ll hear tomorrow from former Vancouver and District Labour Council President, and former Metro Vancouver Alliance chair, Joey Hartman, 1000 people of varied backgrounds and interests came together at the Maritime Labour Centre, to create what is now the thriving activist organization, the Metro Vancouver Alliance.

Although the Metro Vancouver Alliance has been around in some form or another dating back 1993, since 2013 in its most recent and current incarnation, the MVA has worked assiduously and with conscience to …

• Develop innovative solutions to social isolation, to break down the pervasive sense of anomie that has so many in its grip, particularly in the time of our current COVID-19 pandemic;
• Successfully worked with British Columbia’s current provincial government to establish free transit for children ages 5 through 12, in fact all children under the age of thirteen — an initiative enunciated by Premier John Horgan in the recent provincial election;
• Successfully fought with the organizers within the Living Wage for Families offices to establish living wage policies in municipalities across not just the Metro Vancouver region, but across the entire province;
• Committed to working with MVA member organizations and community groups to address the social and affordable housing crisis, to strengthen existing by-laws that protect the rights of tenants, and worked with municipal governments, and the province, to establish covenants that would mandate that landlords could not increase rents beyond the established provincial rate when tenants vacate an apartment, condominium, house or other housing type.

In recent days, Patrick Condon, the founding chair of the UBC urban design programme, and Vancouver City Councillor Colleen Hardwick have made contact with the Metro Vancouver Alliance to encourage the organization to work with them to establish a Tiny Homes pilot project, to be established at member locations of ten faith-based churches, synagogues and temples.

In order to continue the invaluable work of the Metro Vancouver Alliance, and in order that the MVA might hire a full-time organizer, the MVA is currently engaged in a fundraising campaign they’re calling Bridging the Gap, a fundraising initiative that it is hoped will raise $15,000 from a broad cross-section of community members of conscience who live across our region who are committed to social justice, monies that would match the $15,000 raised in 45 minutes at a Thursday, October 15th MVA meeting.

In the time of COVID-19, the Bridging the Gap Fundraiser will occur as a warmly engaging online participant Zoom meeting. You may consider today’s VanRamblings column your special invitation to participate in the Bridging the Gap Metro Vancouver Alliance Fundraiser, scheduled for 5pm tomorrow evening, on Wednesday, November 25th, 2020.

In order to participate in tomorrow night’s fundraiser, click on this link to RSVP for tomorrow evening’s fundraising meeting. Once registered, the good folks at the Metro Vancouver Alliance will post a Zoom participant link to your e-mail address. The fundraiser will be online from 4:30pm, with the official fundraiser getting underway at 5pm, the whole event to wrap at 5:45pm, perhaps the best, most selfless and most rewarding activity in which you might engage throughout the entire upcoming holiday season.

The Metro Vancouver Alliance has established a charitable Canada Helps account. Whether you want to make a one time donation to the MVA, or become a sustaining monthly donor, all you have to do is click on this Canada Helps link, click the down arrow on the right-hand side of the page, choose the Metro Vancouver Alliance (MVA) option, and then click on the CONTINUE WITH DONATION “button”.

Click on the graphic above to go to the Canada Helps website, to donate to the Metro Vancouver Alliance’s Bridging the Gap Fundraiser. You’ll be glad you did! Don’t forget to click on the down arrow to choose the Metro Vancouver Alliance option.

Whether you give just once, or wish to become a sustaining MVA donor, your contribution to the Metro Vancouver Alliance will succeed in making a proportional difference of meaning in the lives of a great many people who need our help. As the MVA is designated as a non-profit, charitable organization, any donation you make will be tax deductible — all the more reason to give generously and from your heart. MVA members thank you.

The members of the Metro Vancouver Alliance look forward to meeting you online at 5pm tomorrow evening. We’ll see you then !!!

Raymond Tomlin

Raymond Tomlin is a veteran journalist and educator who has written frequently on the political realm — municipal, provincial and federal — as well as on cinema, mainstream popular culture, the arts, and technology.

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