Snowshoeing for a cause

The 9th annual Snowshoe race is back. This year, the organizers are partnering with Jack.org, a mental health charity empowering young leaders to revolutionize mental health. Hundreds of people, from the expert snowshoer to first timers, will be running the trail at the top of Grouse Mountain. The trail will be sure to get racers’…

Martin Luther King’s teachings about civil disobedience

“Nonviolence is absolute commitment to the way of love. Love is not emotional bash; it is not empty sentimentalism. It is the active outpouring of one’s whole being into the being of another,” Martin Luther King Jr. As February is Black History Month, members of SFU’s Philosophers’ Café are conducting a discussion related to Martin…

Roof to garage – the building of community

At a time when more people are turning to high-density housing in Greater Vancouver, cohousing is gaining recognition as an alternative to traditional housing. Cohousing is a housing model that aims to build intentional communities. “Traditional low-density housing is unaffordable for many, but most higher density housing often sacrifices public spaces in favour of more…

Chinese bowls of balance

People need to adjust to each season, from autumn right through to winter and spring, says Marilynne Jackson. The Chinese culture has soup to help people do just that. “Soups are made to help through [transitions],” says Jackson, a Chinese-Canadian who will be demonstrating her soup-making skills in an upcoming workshop at the Sun Yat-Sen…

Studying love bigger than race

Jennifer Adkins is a public scholar at UBC engaged in researching interracial relationships and social ideas about race. She hopes to address questions present of race and how humans relate to each other, and to debunk some of the flawed thinking that remains unaddressed in people’s minds. Every idea we don’t know we carry Jennifer…

Slavery and slave trade: A forgotten dark history

In addition to the three historic locations, seen in the previous edition of The Source Newspaper, the slaves’ auction place, the slaves’ chamber, and the slaves’ lashing ceremony, Zanzibar has kept the house of the last slaves’ merchant along with his tomb as part of the cultural historic tour. Being currently in renovation, we could…

Basket motifs illustrate mathematical concepts

In May 2018, the Tla’amin Nation hosted Veselin Jungic and Cedric Chauve, two mathematics professors at Simon Fraser University (SFU), to discuss a project that would combine Indigenous art and mathematics. Less than a year later, through the efforts of three SFU students, an educational tool was created to teach math to Grades 5 through…

Lunar New Year – Year of the Pig and the Pig Heroes

“A lot of people take art too seriously, they think that it belongs to people with certain skills or status, but art is just about life,” says Taiwanese artist, Yen-Chun Lu, with the help of translator Charlie Wu. Lu is the artistic expression behind LunarFest, a contemporary Asian arts and culture festival celebrating its 11th…

Pesky fruit flies save lives

The fruit fly, those tiny winged insects that cluster and circulate over fruit bowls with ripening fruit, deserve a lot more respect. Local genetics researchers are using fruit flies to understand why certain genetic mutations cause tumors, in order to study therapies that might be able to counteract the cell development of cancer. “The use…

Examining connections and alienation

“I find that we are living in a time where people are really hungry for community. There are a lot of resources but we still feel this disconnect,” says Leamore Cohen, Inclusion Services Coordinator at Jewish Community Centre of Greater Vancouver (JCC). February was established as Jewish Disability Awareness and Inclusion Month (JDAIM) amongst Jewish…

Education and immigration policy: a two-way street

Through her work Sandra Schinnerl observed that, despite policy changes that should have eased the transition, international students were often having difficulties finding opportunities to become permanent residents. “Given my experience as a practitioner in the international education field, I wish to share my knowledge of theories of immigration and policy formation in a way…

Recognition for a teacher and a community leader

Among the 2018 Civic Merit Award recipients, Leonora Angeles PhD. and associate professor at the University of British Columbia (UBC), was recognized for her academic and community work on participatory governance, social and cultural policy and gender and race analysis. The Civic Merit Award, first awarded in Vancouver in 1942, is conferred through a unanimous…