Vancouver has been getting negative press after the publication of a Stats Canada report on the happiness of people across the country. Vancouver residents scored themselves lowest of any city. Striving to be the Greenest City, tooting our medal-finish livability rankings, “most unhappy city” is certainly not a title on Vancouver’s bucket list.
The study doesn’t dig into the question of why we are the unhappiest city, but looking at the data pulled from almost 340,000 Canadians, it’s clear that people in big cities tend to score their happiness lower.
Vancouver was the worst, but it was nearly a tie with Toronto. As was also noted in the Vancouver Foundation’s 2012 report called Connections and Engagement, people in big cities have weaker social connections, and generally are more withdrawn from their neighbours, two significant reasons to feel down about one’s life.
But not everyone sees Vancouver as the capital city of morosity. Jennifer Wesman, manager of community programs at the Little Mountain Neighbourhood House, says if Stats Canada’s researchers had spoken to her or any of the 70 staff at this East Side community hub, they would have heard a different story about Vancouver.
We spoke last weekend by phone just before Wesman headed off to support a neighbour at their citizenship ceremony. Wesman, who has been with the neighbourhood house for four years, sees a different Vancouver, one where neighbours get to know each other.
Though it’s true that many on our city are feeling disconnected, Wesman told me Vancouver’s bad rap doesn’t give credit to all the pockets of connection happening across the city. At the Little Mountain location alone, over 150 community members are actively volunteering. Little Mountain is just one of 16 neighbourhood houses creating similar hubs in many of our neighbourhoods. For their volunteers and participants, the local neighbourhood house is often their path out of loneliness, isolation, and in many cases, even unemployment.
It certainly worked for me. I was an at-risk youth in the ’90s. Along with other kids the system was forgetting about, I was poised to while away my final years of high school smoking cigarettes at the bottom of some gulley. A youth outreach worker from the North Shore Neighbourhood House got to me in time. With her connections in the community and her genuine caring, she helped me seek a solution for our problems. Together, we developed a youth drop-in program at a nearby community centre that served much of the North Shore.
It’s not just youth who benefit from neighbourhood houses. Wesman told me of a woman who first came to Little Mountain Neighbourhood House struggling with minimal English and a special needs child. At Little Mountain, she began English classes, got linked up with support for her child, and joined the community kitchen for newcomers. She now staffs the community kitchen program and is helping put together a cookbook Little Mountain will use as a fundraiser. Wesman says there are several staff who started out as program participants and now are also employees.
This is all top of mind for Wesman as Little Mountain, along with the other 15 neighbourhood houses across the Lower Mainland, prep for Neighbourhood House Week which kicks off May 4. The following day, it will host a potluck and bike maintenance workshop. And next week, the cookbook launches too.
If you haven’t visited a neighbourhood house you might think they’re just community centres unburdened from a mandate to provide recreation opportunities, but there are fundamental differences between the two.
While they do not have the square footage of a community centre, neighbourhood houses also don’t have the divisive operating agreements that some Vancouver community centre associations wrestle with.
Their program decisions are nimble and constantly being tailored to the community’s needs.
Neighbourhood houses embrace a community development model and look for ways to build both informal and formal support systems for program participants, linking them with resources and each other.
From literacy programs to potlucks and single mom support groups, neighbourhood houses focus on nurturing the people of the neighbourhood at every life stage.
If Vancouverites want to do something to improve their happiness, visiting a neighbourhood house this week would be a good start. A full list of locations can be found on line at anhbc.org.
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