Greater Victoria Acting Together members have been campaigning to get Oak Bay to improve their secondary suite and roomers / boarders policies for years. And now Oak Bay has directed staff to create a better policy that some other area municipalities!

Members of the Mental Health and Addiction Research Team met with a team in Eugene, Oregon to learn about its success in developing community support for a successful alternative for crises involving mental illness, homelessness, and addiction. They also studied some Canadian examples.

At the urging of Greater Victoria Acting Together (GVAT), Councillor Jeremy Loveday made a motion to allign “the City of Victoria’s vehicle kilometres travelled targets with the targets within the Clean BC plan.” On June 9th Council voted unanimously in favor. This is an important step as the BC government’s CleanBC target is much stronger than Victoria’s present target for replacing automobile traffic with public transit, walking, rolling, and cycling.

This month Victoria City Council voted unanimously in favor of the Rapid Deployment of Affordable Housing policy, which will expedite and lower the cost of building affordable non-profit, government and cooperative housing. “This makes Victoria the first municipality in B.C. to approve an accelerated process for affordable housing city-wide.”

The 2022 provincial budget announced in February contained an exciting announcement: $35 million will be spent over three years to help former youth in care, almost half of whom experience homelessness within one year after they age out of foster care at age 19.

GVAT’s “A Roof For Everyone” workshop had a strong turn out with 34 in-person attendees.