Downtown Eastside | AHA Media

AHA MEDIA is very proud to help provide social media coverage of the 11th Annual Downtown Eastside Heart of the City Festival 2014 in Vancouver

October 25, 2014 ahamedia Leave a comment

AHA MEDIA is very proud to help provide social media coverage of the 11th Annual Downtown Eastside Heart of the City Festival in Vancouver from Wednesday October 29 to Sunday November 9, 2014

See AHA MEDIA’s coverage of last year’s Heart of the City Festival 2013 in reverse chronological order.

Below is Peter Davies of AHA MEDIA proudly holding the Brand New Heart of the City Festival 2014 Festival Program guide

Below is Garvin Snider and Clyde Wright of AHA MEDIA proudly holding the Brand New Heart of the City Festival 2014 Festival Program guide

Below is Garvin Snider of AHA MEDIA thanking people for supporting the Heart of the City Festival 2014

Welcome to the 11th Annual Downtown Eastside Heart of the City Festival

WEDNESDAY OCTOBER 29 to SUNDAY NOVEMBER 9, 2014

Over 90 events at over 25 venues throughout the Downtown Eastside

What an amazing decade it has been since the founding of the festival in 2004. With our 11th annual festival we are honoured to begin our second decade working with and for the Downtown Eastside.

To celebrate and launch this second decade, our 2014 festival theme is ‘Keeping the home fires burning.’ As we prepare to meet the challenges and opportunities of the coming decade, we are inspired by Downtown Eastside residents and artists who carry the flame of our community: they warm our hearts, shed light on pressing concerns, illuminate stories old and new, fire our imaginations, and keep the torch burning for future generations.

The upcoming 2014 Festival features a feast of twelve days of music, stories, songs, poetry, cultural celebrations, films, theatre, dance, processions, spoken word, forums, workshops, discussions, gallery exhibits, mixed media, history walks and an array of artists.

A special festival highlight is the Theatre in the Raw production of The Raymur Mothers, an original musical from Bill Sample and former Vancouver Sun reporter Bob Sarti directed by Jay Hamburger. Featuring thirteen original and rousing songs, The Raymur Mothers brings to life the inspiring story of single moms living down on Campbell Avenue at the Stamps Place (Raymur) Public Housing Project. In 1971 they took action on the train tracks, fighting for a pedestrian overpass to get their children safely to Admiral Seymour Elementary School.

Other 2014 highlights include festival favorites and festival surprises: Carnegie Jazz Band, Barrio Flamenco, Sawagi Taiko, Dovbush Dancers, Keepers of the Flame: A Celebration of Poetry, and much more to be announced.

Visit the Heart of the City Festival website

http://www.heartofthecityfestival.com

On page 45 of the Festival Program guide, there is a writeup on AHA MEDIA

The Festival is thrilled to partner with the DTES’s AHA Media to provide social media coverage (video/photos/blog) of the Heart of the City Festival. AHA Media gives voice to our local community and provides services for individuals and organizations to share their news and special events on a broader scale through social media. Founded in 2008 by local artists April Smith, Hendrik Beune, and Al Tkatch, AHA Media previously collaborated with Fearless City Media and has an ongoing working relationship with W2Community Media Arts and various other organizations and individuals in the DTES community. The members of AHA Media describe themselves as “definitely not mainstream media”. Based in Vancouver’s DTES, their style is described as non-invasive and unassuming.

Say Hello to AHA Media as they visit the Festival events. They will be happy to chat with you. Stay connected to the festival with AHA’s links – see photos/videos of the festival events you attended; take in a festival event you missed; or follow one festival event while you are attending another!

Follow AHA MEDIA on Twitter, Facebook, Youtube and Flickr!

AHA MEDIA Twitter @AHAMEDIA @AprilFilms

AHA MEDIA Facebook http://www.facebook.com/AHAMEDIA

AHA Media YouTube Channel http://www.youtube.com/AHAFilm

AHA Media Flickr Photos http://www.flickr.com/photos/AHAMEDIA/sets

Categories: AHA Media, April Smith, Clyde Wright, Community Engagement, Downtown Eastside, DTES, Garvin Snider, Heart of the City Festival, Heart of the City Festival 2014, Peter Davies, Vancouver, Vancouver Downtown Eastside

Binners Unconference on Oct 20, 2014 in Vancouver

October 21, 2014 ahamedia Leave a comment

A conference on binning is one way UBC’s Learning Exchange, now in its 15th year, is connecting with Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside

Ken Lyotier says dumpster diving is a lot like treasure hunting except the loot involved is bottles and cans that can be returned for a refund. “They’re the gold and silver of street recycling,” he says.

And while bottles and cans may be disposable, he knows people aren’t.

As the co-leader of the Binners’ Project, a working group for waste pickers in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, Lyotier is on a mission to improve working conditions for binning, an often-invisible job performed by many of the city’s homeless.

For the past several months, the group has met inside the carport at the UBC Learning Exchange, a community engagement initiative in the DTES, to talk shop.

“Binners spend most of their waking hours picking through garbage,” says Lyotier, a former binner and longtime partner of the Learning Exchange. “They help keep the city clean and should have a voice in waste management policy.”

A nickel for your thoughts

With this in mind, Lyotier’s group is inviting UBC students and the wider community to the UBC Learning Exchange for a binner’s conference – or unconference, as they prefer to call it – on October 20, from 4:30 p.m. to 7:30 p.m.

The unconference – a more participatory approach to group meetings – will address the issues binners face, like locked dumpsters, and explore the idea of building a national network of street recyclers across Canada.

Source

Categories: AHA Media, April Smith, Binners Project, Community Engagement, Downtown Eastside, DTES, Garvin Snider, Ken Lyotier, Social Media, Vancouver, Vancouver Downtown Eastside

Coffee Cup Revolution in Vancouver

October 9, 2014 ahamedia Leave a comment

COFFEE CUP REVOLUTION EVENT
Oct, 6th, 2014, Victory Square, Vancouver, Canada

The Coffee Cup Revolution is a demonstration depot event being planned for Victory Square in downtown Vancouver on Monday, October 6th, 2014.

Vancouver binners are carrying out a street-level environmental action, reminiscent of United We Can’s efforts in the early 1990’s. That work helped shift social behavior and responsibility and resulted in the expansion of the deposit laws for beverage containers.

The ignition key for this event will be a “pop-up” depot in Victory Square that will pay binners 5¢ for each of those ubiquitous used paper cups that we see strewn across the urban landscape every day.

The spark behind this action is an exploratory venture, The Binners Project which is being supported under Cities for People, an experimental program for advancing urban innovation.

For its première event, the Binners Project has intentionally identified the “disposable” cup as the symbolic evidence of a conspicuous shift in consumer habits over the past several decades. Binners get up close and personal with our urban waste every day so they see first hand, the effects of this shift. Some older binners recall a time when people used to sit together in cafés chatting over steaming pottery cups of hot coffee. Today, in a busy wireless age, with paper cup in hand, we pursue our goals on the go; leaving a trail of cups, lids, stir sticks, and maybe even some of our values behind us in the dust.

A symbol of our times, but so much more, paper coffee cups have become a serious environmental problem. They litter the highways and byways of our cities, each one of them, an aesthetic assault to our collective unconscious. While it is difficult to estimate with absolute accuracy just how many of these cups we go through every year, the most recent statistics we could find suggest that conservatively, it’s well past the 1.5 billion mark. And that represents more than half a million trees, thousands of tons of garbage, and millions of liters of the fossil fuel needed to move this waste to our landfills and incinerators.

Event sponsors and partners: BC Housing, City of Vancouver, Vancity Community Foundation, Central City Foundation, Vancity Community Investment, Haebler Construction, UBC Learning Exchange, The Dugout Drop-in Centre Society, Recycling Alternative, United We Can, DTES Street Market, and other anonymous supporters.

What is a binner?
binner \`bin-ner\ – noun
Canadian west coast colloquialism
1. A person who collects bottles and cans and other objects of value from garbage (in bins); a dumpster diver; The binner pushed a shopping cart full of empties to the bottle depot.
Origin: Attributed to Robert Sarti (Vancouver Sun journalist) – 1990

Categories: AHA Media, Binners Project, Coffee Cup Revolution, Community Engagement, Downtown Eastside, DTES, Garvin Snider, Ken Lyotier, Roland Clarke, Vancouver

DTES Street Market Celebrates the Grand Opening of our Greenway Gallery

September 17, 2014 ahamedia Leave a comment

DTES Street Market Celebrates the Grand Opening of our Greenway Gallery

Where: Downtown Eastside, Pigeon Park (300 Carrall St.)
When: Sunday, September 21st between 12noon and 3pm

The DTES Street Market proudly announces the unveiling of ten (10) large (10ft x 6ft) works of art created by local artists from the Downtown Eastside (DTES) of Vancouver.

These works will be displayed along Carrall St. during market hours (noon to 3pm) on September 21st, 2014.

Each hand painted piece represents a different facet of the DTES culture, and the spirit of the commissioned artist. There will be five (5) pieces painted by Coast Salish and First Nations artists, representing stories from their ancestral home, and their proud cultural heritage. Two pieces on display will celebrate female empowerment and an unwavering celebration of our community. Two more pieces feature Chinese Tibetan Buddha scenes and traditional Chinese dancers. A final piece takes us to the stars with a cosmic ballet captured on canvas.

The DTES Street Market currently provides vending space for over 150 low income residents of the DTES every Sunday, and has been operating continuously since June 2010. We estimate that over $10,000 in commerce is transacted on an average Sunday, delivering over $500,000 into the hands of residents of one of the poorest postal codes in Canada. Over 20 tonnes of waste is removed from landfills every year by the efforts of hundreds of low income binners.

The Greenway Gallery is an important project of the DTES Street Market in its efforts to activate, diversify and beautify the neighbourhood. These large works of art show the personality and talent that is waiting to be unleashed all over our neighbourhood, as well as allowing us to change and improve the types of items that are sold at the market and thus improve the perception of the market itself. The DTES Street Market strongly believes in listening and learning from all voices in our diverse community, for the betterment of all.

Each 10ft x 6ft painting will presented for auction in the coming months to raise money for the DTES Street Market, help subsidize vending space for low income residents, and to facilitate our move from Pigeon Park to 58 West Hastings.

The initial funding for this project, including art supplies and stipends for artists, and the activation of 62 East Hastings as a maker space for art work was supplied by the Great Beginnings program of the City of Vancouver.

For more information, please contact the DTES Street Market Coordinator:
Roland Clarke: 778-323-5415, dtesstmkt@gmail.com, roland.clarke@gmail.com
http://www.greenwaygallery.ca/
https://www.facebook.com/GreenwayGallery
https://www.facebook.com/events/778050712259408/
http://dtesstmkt.blogspot.ca/