Organizing Values
- Access as an ongoing practice
- Accountable to community and neighbours
- Anti-disposability (no relational starts and ends)
- Anti-racism
- Artists’ work is essential
- Communities self-organizing
- Embrace complex (salty) conversations
- Encourage learning between age groups
- Instrumentalize dominant structures against themselves (Billy-Ray Belcourt)
- Joy of cultural work
- Kinship and kindness as method
- Love as process
- Moving at the pace of trust
- No market housing in battleground neighbourhoods
- Nurture relationships amongst cultures and across generations
- Nurture the ecosystem
- Regenerate the art and design sector
- Repair infrastructure
- Transparent communication with artists
History
Beginning as a student-led initiative in 2005, the organization was initially animated by an opposition to the division between contemporary art and design. Leaving the university grounds in 2008 to establish its first public exhibition space, the organization would be shaped by the history and upheavals of its new home in Chinatown, the embattled neighbourhood itself a microcosm of a global economic recession and the transformation of Vancouver before and after the 2010 Winter Olympics.