First United Church, Vancouver
First United is a Community at the Margins situated in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside. It provides a space for belonging, hope and healing 24 hours a day seven days a week. Among the services provided to 300 to 500 people a day are: refuge for those who are homeless, three meals a day, a safe warm dry sleeping space, advocacy and para-legal services, tax filing, a mailing address and programmes that facilitate healing and growth.
First United seeks to stand alongside those who are marginalized and to provide stability as they explore their options and make choices around their life circumstances. To that end, we are not a community of the marginalised, but rather a community that has no margins. Within this inclusive community Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Sikhs and post-modern Atheists together experience and embrace the Sacred within and beyond each of us.
In a broken and divided world we strive to be and become a "New Kind of Community in Old Town Vancouver" – a community in which the weight of alienation is lifted by the gift of belonging; where people can go from streets to housing to homes; where individual sighs of despair become a collective song of hope.
