Cause We Care will be a housing complex for to single mothers and their children similar to Alder Gardens. Photo courtesy of YWCA
For 21-year-old Salina Dharamsi, a member of the Ismaili community in Vancouver, volunteering started early.
She was eight years old when she first helped out at her local mosque. It was something that anchored her, she says, and enabled her to give back to her mosque and the community at large.
Now, volunteerism is simply a part of Dharamsi’s life and has led her to countries as far away as Guatemala, India, Rwanda and Switzerland to work with organizations like the UN, World Vision and the YWCA.
The Ismailis, belonging to the Shia branch of the religion of Islam and living in over 25 different countries around the world, have a deep-seated sense of community, and it is this quality that led Dharamsi to foster her own involvement in volunteer work. Within the larger Ismaili community, it has also led to the creation of events like the Ismaili Walk which was started in 1992.
On Sept. 23, the 21st Annual Ismaili Walk will be partnering with Vancouver’s oldest non-profit organization to raise awareness and funds for the YWCA Cause for Care House.
Based on the model of previous YWCA housing, and taking off from what the YWCA Crabtree Corner Family Resource Center started, Cause for Care is slated to open in 2015 and will be a housing community for single mothers and their children.
All of the women have different stories and a different set of experiences, according to Maia Gibb, fund development manager for the YWCA. Many are immigrants that have come to Vancouver and have become single mothers. They are forced to navigate a city where the language is foreign and the cost of shelter “limits choice in a huge way.”
Cause We Care’s hope is to create stability for those children and assist their mothers in achieving economic and personal independence through programs and facilities that will include access to child care, medical services, ESL and literacy courses and a full service library.
The principles of the Ismaili community and the YWCA are similar, according to Ali Solehdin, a Ismaili Walk volunteer. Both are dedicated to giving back to their community and giving their time, competence, and effort, he adds. It is a mutual goal of the YWCA and the Ismailis to take care of their community and Solehdin believes this begins with women.
“Healthy women create healthy families,” he says. “It is the health of these children that will make them successful and contributing members of their own communities in the future.”
In this way, the Ismailis have come full circle and are giving back to a community that once helped to welcome them. It was this camaraderie and mentoring that gave Dharamsi the sense that she could make a difference at a young age and also made her aware that volunteerism, like the Ismaili Walk itself, can be done by anyone, old or young.
Not only has volunteering deepened Dharamsi’s own faith, but it has also made her realize the importance of her actions, with faith as the base and volunteerism as the action.
