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AHA MEDIA is very proud to support DTES Street Market’s Indiegogo campaign in Vancouver
PLEASE SUPPORT THE DTES STREET MARKET’s Indiegogo campaign !!
The DTES Street Market takes place at Pigeon Park every Sunday from 11am to 5pm.
It is a volunteer run non-profit enterprise that started as a protest against the vending tickets being handed out in the DTES (Downtown Eastside of Vancouver) by the Vancouver Police.
The market provides free vending space for the most marginalized and impoverished groups.
One third of our vendors are women, many current or former sex trade workers, one half are native, a significant minority are from the Chinese retirement community, and many are either homeless or under-housed in the infamous nearby SROs (Single Room Occupancy Hotels).
Over the course of a year, on Sundays only, the market provides over $500,000 of direct economic injection into this low income population by merely providing a free place for them to sell their binned items.
We also estimate that over 20 tonnes of waste is removed from landfills by the recycling efforts of Vancouver’s industrious binners.
Below is the DTES Street Market promo video that AHA MEDIA produced 🙂
What We Are Asking for: We want to expand the market to more days per week at our new location at 62 East Hastings. The City of Vancouver has provided us with a lot, but no additional funding to run a market there. 
We estimate that it will cost an additional $700 per day to run the market at 62 East Hastings. This will provide a minimal stipend for the volunteers to work at the market, picking up trash, registering vendors and setting up the tents and tables. It will also pay for portable bathrooms for the site, as well as garbage pickup. Here is a detailed breakdown of our estimated expenses:
| 62 East Hastings | $693.90 |
| weekly | |
| Coordinators | $210.00 |
| RPICs | $189.00 |
| Marshalls | $49.00 |
| Tent Crew | $40.00 |
| Sandwiches + Coffee | $40.00 |
| Garbage | $45.45 |
| Bathrooms | $120.45 |
The Impact: This budget of $693.90 would pay for one day of operation per week. We would like to go for 3 days per week for a trial period of six months. This takes us to $18,000 total cost ($693.90 X 4.33 X 6). Thank you for Supporting the Street Market
Please click here to donate to DTES Street Market’s Indiegogo Campaign
DTES Street Market on Sunday Oct 27, 2013
Very well attended Street Market before Hallowe’en brought out the fun in everyone in Vancouver Downtown Eastside (DTES)
Roland Clarke says:
It was an amazing Sunday for October. The sun was out and the vendors were happy and out in great numbers. Normally we see a marked decline in the number of vendors right after a welfare Wednesday, and this Sunday, we actually got more vendors than we did the week before. This is almost certainly due to the great weather. I remember hearing on the radio that if Sunday was rain free, it would be the longest rain free spell in October in Vancouver history. I think we missed it because of a brief shower at 6am.
The Kindness of Vendors
Today, as last week, I was really struck by what an amazing thing this Street Market has become. Over 150 vendors, packed into the smallest urban park in Vancouver, and very few fights, very few incidents or altercations. Again, this morning, I had a number of vendors be very accommodating when we asked them to move. It is as if the importance of the market really has filtered down through the culture of the vendors in a way that we did not anticipate. In other ways, I saw great generosity from the vendors. If a customer clearly did not have the money for an item, more than once, I saw a vendor just offer it to the person, or discount it to a dollar. It is this that is also an amazing essence of the market. It is survival vending, and if a vendor feels that they have ‘made enough’ that day, then they can be very generous. The idea, of course, is that the customer may be a vendor to them in the future, and they will receive a benefit from this increased social capital. This is also something that is so missing from the box stores and malls that we have built around us. With the store clerks that are travelling miles to work, and the customers that park en mass in the cold underground parking, we lose that sense of community. The sense that commerce really is the origin of community. The market square IS the origin of the town, and that is the origin of a sense of belonging and neighbourhood. We need this kind of personal interaction with each other, and we need to feel that we are interacting with our neighbors. We need the feeling that the person across the counter is part of our community, and that her/his hard work makes them deserving of the little price increase that they receive by cleaning up the item, or knowing all about it, or telling you a story about it. There is something so genuinely human about this level of interaction and it transcends language, ideology and race. It is something magical that creates a feeling of belonging, and it exists at the Pigeon Park Street Market.
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