Meet Members of the JHS community!

Through our Artist in Residence program, delivered in partnership with the Community Arts Council of Vancouver, our first Residing Artist Lindsay Wong used her skills as a renowned writer to craft profiles on some of the people that make up the JHS, including people that we serve, members of our staff team, and our amazing volunteers. We are pleased to share some of these profiles with you, which you can find below!

The Artist in Residence program is a person-centered initiative delivered from 2018-2020, which used the process of making art as a powerful tool for creative self expression, relationship building, compassion, and empathy.

Daniel: Special Olympic Athlete, Artist, and CSO User

“The CSO has allowed me to become the person I am today.”

Daniel and I have a shared joke about him being “the real artist-in-residence” at the CSO on Fraser Street, while I’m someone that was randomly hired. I have zero fine arts skills, but he’s the one who draws enthusiastically every day.

At twenty-three years old, he’s a dedicated Special Olympics athlete, skilled visual artist, and a service user at John Howard. He’s also one of my neighbors in a community-based apartment building run by JHSLM.

The weather is scorching, so we amble to The Pie Hole, hoping for a slice of apple pie a la mode and a frosty Americano, but the restaurant’s oven is broken, so we decide instead to walk to Starbucks for mid-afternoon coffee and pastries. Despite always being affable, friendly, and articulate in our workshop interactions, he admits that he was nervous speaking with me. “For someone on the [autistic spectrum], new things always worry me,” he says.

At Starbucks, we sip our coffees and he tells me his JHS story. Three years ago, just by coincidence, an outreach worker suggested that he enroll in powerlifting. Since then, he has been actively working out and lifting for competitions. Power-lifting is one of his prime passions, and this summer, he traveled to Nova Scotia for his first ever national competition.

“Powerlifting is a stabilizing binary in my life,” he says, proudly. “It really builds confidence.”

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Once a week, he works out at the gym. Daniel admits that before he began powerlifting, he “was a wreck,” yet now, he can lift up to 374 pounds in a squat and 407 pounds in a deadlift. He plans to pursue the sport as long as he can, as he can’t imagine his “life without it.”

He loves the fierce competition as well as the rousing team sport aspect, receiving regular support from his coaches and team-mates. He’s also the proud recipient of nine powerlifting medals.

Before he came to the JHS, Daniel lived with his parents on the West Side of Vancouver. He was diagnosed with autism at age eleven, and attended a public high school, where he was regularly bullied. He eventually won an award for “Most Improved Student,” and he avidly studied drawing, sculpture and photography, creative subjects that he found to be rewarding and invigorating. He became involved with what he calls “the nerd community,” discovered his immense passion for Transformers, and gradually learned social cues from pop culture and television shows. Yet after high school, he said that he “worked to fit into the ecosystem, but fell flat on [his] face.”

We chat about how school does not necessarily prepare students for the real-world nor help them find suitable jobs. From 2005-2009, I was an undergraduate student at UBC, and I lived in the same neighborhood where Daniel was growing up.

After graduating from high school, Daniel excitedly began his trades education, but after only a couple of years, just before his final exam, he endured a life-altering concussion. Since his former days as an apprentice mechanic, he’s also worked at a retail warehouse and as a dishwasher at a bustling downtown restaurant.

While Daniel was suffering from anxiety and substance use, Daniel’s CLBC community living coordinator referred him to JHS Services. He credits Kelly from the Grassroots program and his first worker, Krista, for referring him to the Special Olympics.

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What Daniel loves about the CSO is its ““a safe communal aspect” where they are “lots of people from different walks of life.” He particularly likes having their coffee on cold weather days, and the staff’s neverending care and support, as The JHS have helped him work successfully towards his life goals.

At 10 or 11 AM, he usually wakes up for a breakfast of leftovers. Then he heads downstairs to the CSO for a cup of coffee, before going back upstairs to his room to check his schedule. In the evenings, he frequently enjoys a walk around the neighbourhood and playing video games with friends. In his spare time, Daniel uses an app (a program that he describes as “Super-Skype”) to run multiple servers, while enjoying the position of moderator and administrator for a model kit club. When he artfully sketches his Transformers and Gundams, his favourite mediums include pens, pencils, and pastels. He enjoys drawing a various cast of characters and experimenting with forms. In the past, he drew armoured vehicles and military subjects.

Currently, he’s enrolled in courses at Langara college, where he’s learning to illustrate graphic novels.

“Art helps get emotions out,” he explains. During his depressive and anxious episodes, he draws “lots of darker stuff, experimental stuff.”

He acknowledges that he ““owes a lot to his mom” who encouraged him “to be what I want to be, and supported him in some very rough times. The strength of my mom and grandma help me along with Special Olympics and the JHS.”

Daniel has been a client of the John Howard Society for four years now, and a Special Olympics athlete for three years. He discusses how “very comfortable” he is at the CSO.

“They’re there to always hear me and support me,” he says. “The Special Olympics and JHS have allowed me to become the person I am today.”

Interesting Facts about Daniel: He “likes quiet moments for reflection” and prefers video games over television. His pupils can dilate bigger than other people. He hates spiders and open spaces, especially on a street corner when it’s very windy, as he feels as if he

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will fall off the world. If he could have dinner with anyon in history, he’d have a bowl of pho with David Bowie. Daniel also enjoys ancient and medieval history.

Favourite Movies: Akira, manga movies, The Star Wars spinoff and Solo; old obscure animated and action movies such as Predator and Demolition Man.

Favourite Comic Books: Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure, Japanese manga, Gundam Side Stories, Ajin.

Favourite Foods: Pho with beef flank steak, homemade Turkish food.

Languages: Conversational Turkish.

Artistic Inspirations: Studio Ghibli, Tom Clancy, Akira Kawasawa, Paul Verhoevenin in Total Recall, Starship Troopers, Hirohiko Araki.

Real-Life Inspirations: His Special Olympics coaches, Gerry and George, who are “really positive influences helping [him] grow and improve.” Both give him general life and styling advice.

Music: “Everything including rap and country, Johnny Cash, Pink Floyd to Star Rogers.”

Sarah Russell: Former Volunteer and Brand New Staff Member

I catch Sarah Russell on her last day as a volunteer at the Community Services Office at Fraser Street. We have lunch at Sal Y Limon, where she orders a tasty vegetarian burrito, and I opt for a burrito bowl laden with ribbons of beef, chicken, sausage, rice, cabbage, and white strings of melted cheese.

“I’m a water kind of girl,” she says, when I ask her if she wants a beer or margarita. Normally, she likes a cold beer, but she has work in the afternoon.

Sarah finds us a table in the back.

When our food arrives, my burrito bowl is delicious and the lunchtime work crowd swarms the counter, while cheerful, upbeat Mexican music creates a vacation-like ambience.

I take a swig of my can of Diet Coke, while Sarah doses hot sauce on her burrito.

“The spice level here is for white girls,” she warns me, and then asks me if I’m sure if I don’t want any hot sauce.

I’m absolutely sure. I’m a wimp when it comes to spicy food.

Sarah is just finishing up a practicum to complete her Bachelors of Social Work from The University of Victoria; she has one more course before she can graduate. As a writer, I’m always curious about how someone chooses their vocation, especially one as seemingly compelling and selfless as outreach. It’s true when artists and writers tell you that they can’t ignore their obsessive calling to create art--speaking from my own experience and from those of my literary peers, we frequently turn down 9-5 jobs with steady income, all because of the possibility of losing “writing time.”

But my four months at JHS have taught me so much about generosity, community, and compassion.

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As we eat, Sarah and I chat animatedly about our backgrounds and our distinct but seemingly overlapping roles at JHS.

I find out that Sarah is a warm, dedicated, empathetic thirty-three year old who rides the bus two hours each way from Maple Ridge to volunteer full-time (a four-hour commute each day) just to get to the CSO on Fraser Street.

I tell her that I’m impressed with her commitment.

She shrugs, looking modest. “I get a lot of reading done on the bus,” she says, as if her ability to read on the bus without motion sickness explains her dedication.

“What’s your John Howard Story?” I ask, curious.

Before Sarah found her vocation, she began her BFA at the age of nineteen in Contemporary Dance at Simon Fraser University, finishing her degree at the age of twenty-three. A Toronto transplant, she was formally trained in contemporary ballet at a special performing arts high school before she began her studies at SFU. After graduation, she taught yoga where her practice and teaching “opened her up about life issues.” It was here that she began to question her purpose when her students began discussing larger, three-dimensional personal issues with her.

“How does one talk about life?” Sarah asks me, pausing to chew thoughtfully on her burrito.

I don’t know. It’s a heavy, complex question--how does one talk about life?

It’s a rhetorical question that I’ve been trying to answer since pursuing graduate studies in memoir-writing.

Soon after, Sarah began a counselling course at Vancouver Community College and loved the small classroom atmosphere. It was at VCC that she fully discovered her passion for helping others, finding that “real life people” offered so much more than academia, which she felt were far removed from reality.

When she didn’t get into a Masters of Counselling program, she realized that social work was her true passion.

At JHS, she has found the entire experience to be both “very different” from what she expected and also “eye-opening,” especially when she shadowed an outreach worker and his client to a doctor’s appointment. It was her first time inside a Single-Occupancy Residency in the Downtown Eastside,

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and she found it to be both disturbing and shocking when she saw how it was extremely financially difficult for clients who were on disability cheques, who were paying $750/month for a tiny, decrepit room without a kitchen.

Previously, before JHS, she she volunteered as a SMART recovery group support meeting facilitator with Vancouver Coastal Health’s addiction services. She currently teaches yoga to children and young adults with Down Syndrome at the Down Syndrome Research Foundation in Burnaby, and also helps with their summer day camps.

We then discuss her full-time volunteer duties at the front-desk at the CSO. From my one day of shadowing, I understand how complicated and daunting answering the phone can be--it takes tremendous multi-tasking and hospitality skills. We laugh about the learning-curve about using the intricate phone system and learning that clients can actually be put “on hold” when looking up their files.

Besides her long list of volunteer administrative duties, Sarah has assisted drop-in clients with transfers, filling out intake forms, and she has patiently sat one-on-one with clients at the computer, helping those who struggle with basic literacy.

On Tuesdays and Thursdays, she’s also hosted a forty-five minute yoga class for JHS clients and staff, creating a casual and positive space to get “their bodies moving.”

“People have so little but they want to be accepted,” she says, when we chat about particular JHS clients that we both know as individuals and how most of them just want someone to acknowledge them as human beings. “They want to be “‘seen’,” she offers, and we agree that there’s a serious social stigma about special needs in our society.

She optimistically adds that she “hopes that it [social stigma] gets better in the world.”

For Sarah, she loves meeting the clients in her day-to-day interactions. “Knowing that the type of work changes lives is huge,” she says, nodding emphatically. What she particularly loves about JHS is that the staff work hard to provide an environment that is “‘honest, vulnerable, [and] not following the status quo.”

We then discuss one client in particular, someone who is currently struggling with deep emotional turmoil.

“You see him go through peaks and valleys,” she explains. “His smile is infectious, and you can feel his energy. Just knowing that he’s in a good space makes me happy.”

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“I think he’s already doing better,” I say.

Sarah really enjoys witnessing client quirks and seeing their “moments of lightness.” She describes watching a client listening to heavy metal on his computer screen at the CSO, sometimes hangbanging while brushing his teeth simultaneously, as if the outside world doesn’t exist while he’s immersed in his loud music.

“I love how different the clients are and I appreciate how [the JHS] are all client-oriented,” she tells me, grinning.

I nod, agreeing wholeheartedly with her.

“Their success stories need to be celebrated,” she continues, believing that it’s as simple as publicly telling client stories to “improve the stigma of JHS as a place for criminals.”

Sarah describes herself as “friendly, compassionate and open-minded,” and I know that her future clients are incredibly lucky to have her as an ally, inspiration, and devoted mentor. Starting this week, she will be working at Vancouver Apartments and providing 24 hour support to four people as a contract worker.

Facts About Sarah:

Favorite TV Shows/Movies: Sex And The City. She loves competitive dance shows; romantic comedies; admires Will Ferrell, Amy Poehler, Tina Fey

Recommended Book: You Are a Badass®: How to Stop Doubting Your Greatness and Start Living an Awesome Life by Jen Sincero

Favorite Music: Music “serves different purposes” for Sarah. Pick-me up music includes Jamaican Dancehall, reggae, 2004 girly hip hop, reggaeton, Spanish dance music, folk, country, beat music.

Favourite Foods: Japanese beer, avocado rolls, traditional Lebanese falafel

Interesting Anecdote: She grew up in the same neighbourhood as her husband in Ontario; they attended the same elementary school, but didn’t meet until their first year at SFU. Sarah is a “total believer in fate and things happening for a reason.”

Animals: Sarah’s a dog person depending if she knows the dog.

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Travel: She’s spent a lot of time in Mexico. In 2016, she travelled to fourteen countries.

Other Job: Sarah currently teaches at Y Yoga

Secret Talents: She used to be able to recite Clueless and Dazed and Confused verbatim. She also has a great nose; she was obsessed with smelly markers as a kid, and the scent of bathroom cleaner reminds her of Mexico.

David’s JHS Story: Finding One’s Cultural Roots, Legacy, and Inspiration

David Lee, former Executive Director of Organization Development, began his work at the JHS exactly one and a half years ago. Previously, he worked for a pipeline company in the oil and gas industry. At first, I’m surprised by his change in career, but he explains that it’s “not drastic,” as he’s worked for the nonprofit sector before, providing business expertise to organizations such as Megaphone and The Binners Project, local groups in Vancouver that support and assist marginalized people.

“My brother is the one who made a huge career change,” he tells me. David’s younger brother in Calgary began an engineering career in oil and gas before recently switching to nursing school. It amazes and inspires me that someone who has an undergraduate degree in business from Western University and a competitive MBA from The University of British Columbia is able to switch seamlessly into a nonprofit managerial role, yet “doesn’t see himself as corporate” but rather, as someone who enjoys forming close connections to rural and smaller communities. Although he does admit that his educational background in commerce helped him envision “how business is helpful to the broader community.”

My conversation with David turns out to be illuminating; he’s philosophical, wise, and strikes me as more of an academic and intellectual. David describes himself as “thoughtful, steady, and caring.”

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What is both similar and particularly resonating to me is our backgrounds of having Asian immigrant parents. David is one generation from Korea and had a “classic upbringing of Asian and western.” In fact, he’s very interested in his roots and community, and specifically curious about his personal and complicated connections to his own heritage and ever-shifting sense of cultural identity.

We discuss what inspires David both professionally and personally, and he reveals to me that his parents arrived from Korea to Canada discover more opportunities. Two weeks ago, he found out that his father was a refugee for two-three months during the incursion of North Koreans in the city. Both of his parents had five-six siblings each, and there was often not enough food for everyone.

Growing up in the comfort of Canada, David could never conceive of their intense hardship and suffering. Furthermore, upon arriving in Canada, David’s father only had $20 and a duffel bag, taking the Greyhound from Montreal to Edmonton, and I imagine it to be a hard and frightening journey, full of uncertainty and language barriers.

David explains: “This is [the] real inspiration to me, something I relate to--why the work we do [at JHS] is important. I haven’t lived it [my parents’ suffering] but I’m moved by this intergenerationally. This definitely influences what I value, stories of that and what they [my parents] had to do, to make things work.”

I can relate to this multifaceted dilemma. As a child of Chinese immigrants, I constantly face this challenge and the very complicated question of authentic cultural heritage and intergenerational trauma that we inherit by default genetics.

Because of his family’s emotional story of struggle and survival, David’s fascination and personal connection to his family legacy continues to vastly influence his work at JHS, which he has experienced the culture of “accepting people where they are at.” The majority of his work at JHS consists of Regional Support, where he acts in a senior leadership capacity, providing overall support to the teams across all programs and locations, which he says “do the real work directly related to our mission.” He doesn’t deal directly with clients, but his team ensures that “the lights are on,” essentially ensuring that bills are paid and wages go out to JHS employees on time. He describes the Regional Support team as the “support structure,” who are “deliberately in the background.”

“It’s most important for us on the Regional Support team to make things available as needed. If the finance perspective isn’t taken care of, we can’t ensure the sustainability of things. But care for people is the first and foremost thing,” he continues. “The program teams focus on the people we serve and bring intuition into our decisions, and they’re supported by the processes and structure of the Regional Support team.”

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David again references his previous work for the pipeline company as valuable experience for the work he does for JHS. He says: “It’s the same work--how to find ways to support people who bring different skills, perspectives and experience to come together to work towards a common goal.”

We both agree that the CSO on Fraser Street, led by Teddy and Lisa, work incredibly hard to foster a compassionate, caring, and people-oriented environment.

Not surprisingly, David brings this philosophy and inherited values to his own hobby, which consists of running long distances. He gathers “positive energy” from the outdoors. On weekends, he has been running sometimes one-three hours a day, and on a long weekend, he once spent what he describes as “fourteen hours of moving,” i.e. running across the Sunshine Trail (180 kilometers) with a friend.

“It’s definitely Type 2 Fun,” he says, and explains the differences between Type 1 and 2 Fun. He describes his extended marathon as Type 2 Fun, which is “suffering while doing it, yet it brings a person deep joy and satisfaction in the long run, while Type 1 Fun is having fun while doing it.”

As a nature and wilderness person, he finds that running provides him with necessary “energy,” as he tells that it’s important for him to have a healthy work-life balance. When he first started working at JHS, he devoted six-seven days a week to his position, but he is now finally able to enjoy weekends, “and have sustainability while also finding that time away.” Every few weeks, he spends time with his friends and family in Calgary, and visits relatives in the States.

David admits that he’s very lucky,” that “running and trails” is a luxury of choice given to him, and not imposed by anyone else.

At one significant moment, while running for three days on the Sunshine Trail, he remembers zoning out to the point of “sleep-running.” He laughs. “This sounds absolutely absurd, going to the point of falling asleep when running, why would you do that to yourself? You're tapping into something.”

This surreal, subconscious experience of “sleep-running,” was a turning point for him which he connects back again to his father, who would tell David stories about “sleep-marching” during his time in the Korean army.

His parents and their momentous story of immigration and survival have shaped his life purpose, his intrinsic core values, and his ongoing work at JHS--his parents’ past continues to affect and alter David’s own sense of self and well-being.

If David could go back in time and have dinner with anyone, he’d have a meal with his parents when they were a young couple--all to discover their infinite hopes and aspirations. He’d ask them how they would describe what they were looking forward to in their lifetime and how they saw their future

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retrospectively. He’d also reveal himself to his parents as their future son. David tells me that his mother believes in reincarnation, and that she’d would interpret his presence as a sign from the universe. She wouldn’t be a skeptic if he told her that he’d been sent from the future.

“I’m grateful for how much they [my parents] have provided for, but it explains why we do things--like why run long distances? There’s this fortune of having that choice and what I choose to do,” David says, musing thoughtfully and sipping his tea. “That luxury of doing it by choice, as I don’t need to travel, but rather it [this experience] is something to gain.”

Interesting Facts about David

Favourite TV Shows: Breaking Bad, Stranger Things, anything on Netflix.

Favorite Movies: The original Star Wars.

Favorite Books: Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression – and the Unexpected Solutions by Johann Hari, a British author. David spends time thinking about the book and his own work at JHS. Since depression and addiction are on the rise, the book examines the loss of connection to one’s community vs. pharmaceutical companies and chemical imbalances. David usually reads nonfiction instead of fiction.

Another favourite book is Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values by Robert M. Pirsig. Even though he does not ride or fix bikes, David admires the philosophy about how the bookapproaches the ins-and-outs of the life cycle.

Favorite Foods: The situation, in addition to having a great variety of food are important to David. The day I chat with David, he tells me that he ate a “super vegetarian burrito” at Sal Y Limon for lunch, which is a meal he enjoys every two weeks. He’s been trying eat “more vegan,” but enjoys bacon and eggs. David enjoys sushi, and recently, the finance team had a pizza taste-off. In the summer, he likes a good barbeque, salmon and roast veggies. When he’s back home in Calgary, he loves a Korean home cooked meal. He particularly likes Miyeok-guk, which consists of sliced rice cakes, beef chunks, and seaweed. The soup is a traditional and nutritious meal consumed by women who have just given birth in Korea.

Travel Plans: He will be travelling extensively around British Columbia. David has lived in Alberta, Ontario, London, Sydney, and next year, he plans to visit Korea to reconnect with his cultural heritage. While visiting his family in Korea, he hopes to run a marathon in Seoul. David likes to travel with the purpose of knowing people and a place more deeply, yet this visit to Korea will be timely since his one hundred-and five year-old grandmother just passed away. Her death has prompted him to visit that

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side of the family since it’s been ten years since he’s been to Korea, despite regularly Skyping his relations.

Interesting Anecdote: David has been on Australian network television. His friends and him invented Air Guitar t-shirts, and then they played air guitar on Australia's television i.e. “the CBC of Australia.”

Secret Talents: David has an “interest in creative things.” “In the past, I’ve had a phase where I made short films,” he says, and describes himself as an amateur. He’s made a documentary about “where our food comes from.” He once went to a farm in Abbotsford and butchered, cleaned and roasted a chicken, and filmed the whole process. During his artistic phase, he made wedding videos as gifts for friends; in retrospect, they “were way too long since [he] didn’t know how to edit. “They’re definitely not for anyone who isn’t in it,” he says, laughing.