The Founding Board

Hi! I’m Laurence. I thought it might be useful for folks to know something about the person asking them to consider this project. I’m 38, born and raised in Calgary, transplanted to Vancouver a decade ago. By day I work as a geospatial data analyst with the Province of British Columbia. The rest of the time you’ll find me outdoors, playing music, or with family and friends (who I adore!).

Before my data career I spent over a decade working in recreation: directing a summer camp for kids with disabilities, coordinating mentors with Big Brothers Big Sisters, teaching rock climbing, and serving as founding manager and policy writer for the Simon Fraser University climbing wall.

Since then my organizing has been more grassroots: pro-democracy work as Operations Coordinator (and hype man!) with Democracy Rising as democratic institutions came under strain south of the border, and even a stint as Transportation and Logistics lead for a regional Burning Man camp. During the 2025 BCGEU strike I took a large role on the picket line, organizing recreation and committees and spending a good part of it as a wandering troubadour, going line to line getting people singing together. Got a good few folks belting Rihanna’s “Umbrella” — solidarity, am I right or am I right?

Through all of it, I’ve been an unusually devoted uncle to two nephews, now four and seven, whom I’ve helped raise since they were born. I like to say I’ve packed more school lunches than 99% of childless people … except maybe cafeteria workers (bless them).

Why am I attempting this slightly crazy project?

A few things in my life kept nagging at me, and they all seemed to point the same way.

Too often I was seeing relationships get stretched past what they could comfortably hold. Friendships and chosen families that are full of love but don’t have much structure under them, so they’re liable to crack under serious conflict. Outdoor communities that I’ve spent my life in and cherish, but where your place often depends on your income and your body holding up. Couples expected to be each other’s whole world and straining under the weight of that. New parents raising kids with barely any village around them, while social media paints impossible pictures of how it’s supposed to look. All in all: a lot of good people worn down.

All of this seems to be sitting on top of a world that keeps getting harder to live in. Costs climb faster than wages, work feels progressively less secure, and there’s a constant undercurrent of climate and political alarm. It’s now come to the point where people I love are directly affected: lay-offs and our fair share of mental health struggles. I think it’s harder here in Vancouver than a lot of places, where sky-high housing and a famously guarded social culture can squeeze connection out right when people need it most.

Two things pushed me from noticing all this to actually trying to do something. First, my activism has taught me a sobering lesson: shared values, however correct and righteous, don’t hold people together on their own. It was also hard to miss that the reactionary movements I’d least want to emulate were often the best at making people feel like they belonged, to their great advantage and everyone else’s peril. Then the 2025 picket line showed me the flip-side. People from every kind of background found real solidarity there by virtue of being held together by something tangible. (See “Umbrella,” above.)

And then my nephews started asking what their culture is, and I found I wasn’t able to give a really great answer beyond “Canadian” and “Vancouverite” (as wonderful as those things may be!). I wanted something vibrant and alive and supportive and present that I could potentially give them as an option. I grew up with a beautiful set of values and practices, but I got them as a kind of atmosphere. There was nowhere to gather around them or keep them alive in a way that you could truly count on. Maybe that’s fine in an easier world. In the one kids are growing up in today, I’m not so sure.

So in my mind, all of it adds up to the same thing: the need for a tangible, democratic community built on shared values. Somewhere with enough structure under the love that a serious conflict doesn’t end the whole thing, and where your place isn’t riding on your income or your body holding up. Something of a village again, to take some of the strain off family life. And ideally something good enough that when a kid asks where their place is, you’ve actually got an answer. It sounds pretty amazing to me…

Nobody was building it. And when I looked at my own strange résumé (writing founding policy for a recreation facility, running a camp, coordinating mentors, moving a Burning Man camp’s worth of gear, pro-democracy organizing, keeping a picket line singing, and even the skills to build this website), I figured I was about as prepared for it as anyone was likely to be.

So here I go! I’d love it if you came along and made this as much yours as it is mine!