Organizing Values
Communal
- Accountable to our community and neighbours
- Led by self-organizing communities
- Embrace complex conversations
- Move at the pace of trust
Equitable
- Practice anti-racism and access as ongoing commitments
- Oppose market housing in battleground neighbourhoods
- Nurture intergenerational and cross-cultural relationships
- Empower and learn from youth
Practical
- Instrumentalize dominant structures against themselves (inspired by Billy-Ray Belcourt)
- Repair and reimagine infrastructures
- Nurture ecosystems
- Regenerate the art and design sector
Joy of Cultural Work
- Reject disposability culture and embrace continuous relationships (no start and no end)
- Affirm the essential nature of artists' work
- Practice kinship and kindness as our methods
- Love as core to our process
- Cultivate transparent and open lines of 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.