2024 Yarrow Fundraiser: Weaving Hearts 世代相承 心心相繫 for Chinatown and DTES seniors
Join Yarrow in celebrating the year of the wood dragon by donating funds to support our work with low income Chinatown seniors. Read below to find out how your contributions help and how to get tax receipts!
Update February 1 2024: Tax receipts now available!
If you would like to donate $100 or more and receive a charitable tax receipt, you are welcome to donate to Yarrow through our partner organization the Network of Inner City Community Services Society (NICCSS). All donations processed by NICCSS will go towards Yarrow’s work in supporting Chinese seniors through our collaborative programs.
IMPORTANT: When making a donation through the NICCSS PayPal page, please include your full name, full address and phone number to receive a tax receipt. To ensure your donation reaches us, please include "Yarrow'' in the note section.
If you prefer to send a cheque, please make it payable to: “Network of Inner City Community Services”, note "Yarrow" in the memo, and mail to #200-739 Gore Avenue Vancouver B.C. V6A 2Z9 Canada.
Your giving goes a long way:
$25 will feed one senior for a week , providing them with access to nutritious, culturally appropriate, home-delivered groceries.
$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 and 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 empower a senior to overcome cultural and language barriers through medical accompaniment and interpretation support at hospital and specialist appointments.
$750 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.
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 groceries to seniors and at-risk community members in the Chinatown and Strathcona community;
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
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 through continual . Our priorities for 2024 include continuing our core services and programming to support low income seniors, revamping our food programming to focus on food sovereignty and food justice, and advocating for community spaces and affordable housing in Vancouver Chinatown. 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 Weaving Hearts 世代相承 心心相繫 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 Haru Chiu, in collaboration with Sunny Chiu.
How to receive charitable tax receipts
We are finalizing our tax receipt donation process and will update once this is available in early Februrary!
This fundraiser is taking place on the traditional, ancestral, unceded, and occupied territory of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm. sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and the sel̓íl̓witulh Nations.