Join Yarrow in celebrating the year of the wood snake by donating funds to support our work with low income Chinatown seniors. Read below to find out how your contributions help!
This year, we are happy to share that we will be providing a charitable tax receipt for donations of $50 or more. To receive a tax-receipt for your gift of $50 or more, please visit www.yarrowsociety.ca/donate.
Your giving goes a long way:
- $25 will feed one senior for a week , providing them with access to nutritious, culturally appropriate, home-delivered hot meals.
- $50 will allow Yarrow to continue operating in a central space in Chinatown , where seniors can access Yarrow services including food rescue pick-ups, appointments to discuss their casework with our outreach team, and guidance of tech support and tech literacy.
- $100 will provide safe community spaces for over 50 seniors to commune weekly and monthly for art and educational workshops, ranging in topics from disability justice to poetry writing to tenancy rights
- $250 will connect 100 seniors to our Chinese Seniors’ Hub morning exercise group, which runs twice a week, supporting seniors’ social connectivity, physical health, and leadership skills.
- $500 will fund a youth-led intergenerational event to build meaningful programming to connect seniors members with youth volunteers, building enriching bridges of knowledge and cultural sharing.
- $750 will empower a senior to overcome cultural and language barriers through medical accompaniment and interpretation support at hospital and specialist appointments.
- $1000 will supply a years worth of gardening supplies and tools for seniors and volunteers to plant culturally appropriate foods and plant medicines in accessible garden boxes.
- $5000 will allow for weekly programming at the McLean Park Fieldhouse for 2025 for seniors and volunteers to do culturally appropriate events, workshops and community gardening.
Why contribute to Yarrow?
-
We provide
one-on-one support for seniors
who face language and cultural barriers to accessing
government services to meet their housing, health, and income needs.
-
We
provide free, culturally safe case management services in Chinese
in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. We are one of the only two
organizations offering this service, even though Chinatown and
Strathcona have
32% and 45%
of people speaking Chinese as their main language at home respectively.
- We help seniors access basic healthcare by providing medical accompaniment and interpretation support at their hospital and specialist appointments.
- We deliver fully subsidized, culturally appropriate hot meals to seniors and at-risk community members in the Chinatown and Strathcona community.
- We empower seniors through the use of technology and advisory committees with our Seniors Hub Program.
- We challenge social isolation among Chinese seniors through coordination of culturally appropriate activities, festivities and celebrations.
Why are donations important?
Your donations matter because they make it possible for us to be directly accountable to our community and the needs of our seniors and youth. Every donation and sharing of this campaign helps significantly.
Non-profits are accountable to the people who fund them. When we apply for a grant, we must meet the program requirements set forth by the funder and actualize their priorities. While Yarrow is grateful for the grant support we receive, unfortunately funder priorities do not always align with the needs of our community. Furthermore, funder priorities may change from year to year, even though the core services and programs that our community needs have not changed.
Donations are not only a financial action, but also a political action. We believe that building a broad base of individual donors from the community is an important way to sustain our work. We are now reaching out to our community again and asking you to help us continue to grow so we can focus on serving and empowering our youth and seniors!
Our long-term vision and 2025 priorities
Our vision is of a Chinatown that is intergenerational and thriving, with accessible and culturally relevant services and an environment that cherishes our seniors and youth.
To make this vision real, we are working to build our organization’s capacity to serve and empower marginalized seniors in Chinatown. Our priorities for 2025 include:
- Continuing our core services and programming to support low income seniors.
- Revamping our food programming to focus on food sovereignty and food justice.
- Advocating for community spaces and affordable housing in Vancouver Chinatown.
- Creating weekly programming at the McLean Park Fieldhouse with our Fieldhouse Stewart.
- Resume grocery deliveries of culturally appropriate items such as rice, tofu and eggs.
Visit https://www.yarrowsociety.ca/programs to learn more about our core programs and services.
We recognize that our community’s service needs come from systemic inadequacies and inequality. While it has been long been acknowledged that racialized people and people who do not speak English as their first language face more obstacles to accessing vital services and community connections, these obstacles still remain. Long-term inequalities require us to build power as a community and demand long-term solutions. For this, Yarrow will need your continued support.
This Lunar New Year, we hope you will join us in giving our seniors the gift of nourishment, health, and social connection.
Share this campaign with your friends and family
Once you've completed your donation, we ask that you share and spread the word about Streams to River, Rivers to Ocean 世代長流 Fundraiser on your frequented platforms! Once you check out, you will automatically see the option to share on a wide variety of socials. Every engagement helps us slowly reach our fundraising goal just a little bit more.
All illustrations for this campaign are done by Sunny Chiu.
This fundraiser is taking place on the traditional, ancestral, unceded, and occupied territory of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm. sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and the sel̓íl̓witulh Nations.
