Downtown Eastside Neighbourhood House

Organization Type: Social & Community Services
Address: 573 E. Hastings St, Vancouver, British Columbia V6A 1P9
Website: http://dtesnhouse.ca

The mandate of the Downtown Eastside Neighbourhood House is to provide programming and educational, leadership, social and recreational opportunities to residents of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.

Our vision is to provide a dignified welcoming space that creates and supports an improved quality of life for the DTES community.

Our mission is to provide opportunities for residents to meaningfully engage with and contribute to their community in an equitable atmosphere of sharing and learning.

The secular, grassroots Downtown Eastside Neighbourhood House (DTES NH) embraces people of all ancestries, genders, ages and descriptions; annually welcoming almost 9,000 DTES residents in a community where 70% of our neighbours have low‐incomes, 700 are homeless and 5,000 are under-housed.

Our programming is community inspired and varied, a sampling of which has included a Chinese Elders Community Kitchen, Traditional Aboriginal Community Kitchen, Leadership Development, a Children’s Community Kitchen, Nutritional Outreach Activities (Mobile Smoothie Project and Banana Beat), The Healing Circle, Father’s for Thought, Table Talks project, Family Drop In: Families, Farming and Food, Community Drop-in and the production of a Right to Food Zine.

Those who built the DTES NH put the Right to Food at the heart of our work, as nutritional vulnerability was a theme familiar to all. Our goal around the Right to Food is to reform the nutritional impact, quality, abundance and delivery of food in the DTES in consultation with residents, community food providers, non‐food community organizations, healthcare professionals, policy makers, growers/suppliers, food/beverage industry professionals and researchers.