Stanley Hotel

Stanley hotel is the name of the building our homebase (office) is located in. It is in Downtown Eastside, a neighbourhood that is a little bit different from all other neighbourhoods I have been to before. It is the poorest area in North America. It also has the highest infection of HIV in the western world. I have never seen so many homeless people before, never in my hole life, not even in the poorest countries in Asia, have I seen what I am seeing now.

This feels rather strange since Vancouver has a rumour of being the best city in the world and in addition to that has a lot of money. You can see construction work everywhere. The city is being repaired for the Olympics 2010. Millions of dollars are invested in this happening, the government do nothing for the people living on the streets. It is mostly non-governmental organizations that have taken upon this task, one of them, which has given us the homebase from free.

Vancouver has more then 2000 homeless people, which most of them is located in this neighbourhood. Our homebase is in the middle of it. We have one guy sleeping in front of the door, another lady smoking crack in our balcony and a set of heroine syringes pined to the building wall. And our backyard is called blood alley by the people living there. So why has the Kaospilots decided to stay here? One of the things we are working with here is social sustainability, one of the school’s values is social innovation and responsibility. So why not be right in it? For me is quite cool and interesting place to be in.

When our team moved in to our new office space yesterday we knew that it was going to be a lot of work of fixing it up. It was just a dirty and empty space. But we had a small budget from school and an owner allowing us to do what we wanted with the premises. Abracadabra, and we all turned in to interior designers. Everything should be ready for Tuesday, when we have our first lecturer coming in. I’ll keep you updated..