News & Events

What do you do at the end of a long, hard week of running your own home-based business? If you are Beverly and Andrew, you spend every Friday afternoon serving dinner to the Our Place family. Beverly and Andrew find that volunteering is a meaningful way to end the week. Their time at Our Place […]

“I’ve been a volunteer with Our Place for several years,” says Janet who enjoys helping out at reception and in both kitchens. “Four days after I retired, I was talking to my husband and realized I needed to get out of Dodge,” she laughs. Janet previously worked as a travel agent for more than 20 […]

Tim Dafoe never thought he could have a new start, nor if he was even worth it. Between the ages of 10 and 21, Tim spent 9 years inside one institution or another, learning not how to live in society, but how to hide from it. “I went through a lot of trauma at a […]

From Victoria to Paris and back again, Leslie has lived a whirlwind life that saw her climb the peaks of happiness to the valleys of despair. Born in Victoria, Leslie moved at a young age with her family to Hawaii where she graduated high school and attended university. From there, she travelled to Paris where […]

The one word that has followed Tony around for his entire life is ‘Trouble’. He doesn’t know if his birth parents loved him — or even wanted him. He only knows that he was given up for adoption at 21/2 years old. That abandonment by his birth family ingrained in him that even at such […]

Without a lone moment of kindness, Forest may have fallen deeper into the depths of addiction. After moving to Vancouver from Victoria with a girlfriend at the age of 18, Forest dipped his* toe into the heroin scene as a rite of passage to becoming a writer. The authors he admired (Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, […]

“It’s a blessing to be able to help the person I used to be.” — Benoit Growing up in Montreal, Benoit had a very typical Canadian childhood until he became a teenager. That was when a predatory member of his extended family turned Benoit’s world into one of shame, anger and despair. “I left home […]

It seems there is no place quite like Our Place, and I feel truly blessed to have the chance to work alongside such dedicated and compassionate people. When I first came to Canada — from Ireland via the UK — 15 years ago, I debated at length whether to make a life in Victoria or […]