Imagine you are a struggling, recovering female drug addict or street worker, trying to get your life back together, and hoping and praying someone would just give you a break.  We’ve all read about the Pickton murder trials, and read the biographies of the women victims who went missing.  In these biographies, you start to realize that these women had previous lives, and families, and loved ones.  Life dealt these women tough blows, and their fate was a terrible one.

Louise Edwards, the Godmother of the Downtown Vancouver Eastside

Enter a woman, referred to as the Godmother of the Downtown Eastside Vancouver.  Louise Edwards is her name, and she has been on a personal mission over the past 20 years to help these desperate women.  Guess where she lives? – Kamloops!  What does she do?  Louise listens to the women’s needs, and gathers donations from the Kamloops community, and drives down every 2 – 3 weeks to deliver these donations to the Downtown Eastside  Vancouver women.

Now how, you may ask, does this have anything at all to do with Home Staging?

Well, recently, I attended the Real Estate Staging Association’s (RESA) monthly meeting.  We are a fledgling group, and anxious to form the first RESA chapter in Metro Vancouver.  For those of you who don’t know, RESA is the governing body for Home Stagers in the U.S. and Canada.

This was a fun meeting, as I was able to meet other fellow stagers and chat about our industry, the successes and the challenges that go along with owning your own small business.  As sole proprietors, it’s great to share a common passion, and although we are each other’s competition, we are also each other’s network and support.  More importantly, we decided as a group that one of our missions was to help our community.  Enter Louise Edwards.

Louise spoke to our group about the struggles of the Downtown Eastside Vancouver women. There is virtually no budget to help out these women obtain simple “luxuries”, such as a freezer or a working oven.   At the moment, there is an old hotel, called Sereena House, where women who are trying to work their way back into society reside.   We have agreed, as a group of Vancouver Home Stagers, to help furnish this cold, stark abode into a warm, comfortable living space, that will remind the women of “home”.

By carefully listening to the women’s needs, we will create a functional main area living space for dining and a social area for playing cards and watching t.v.  As home stagers and designers, you will be sure that we will be creating as beautiful a space as we possibly can.  We already have a freezer to donate, and we are all pitching in for the cost of delivery to Sereena house.

We are an excited group of Vancouver Home Staging women, ready and willing to help our fellow women in need.  If you would like to help, please feel free to contact me and I can arrange for pick up of any donated items you may have.