Happy New Year + Updates

Happy New Year!

Throughout the last term VIPIRG has been keeping busy promoting our housing project!

On October 19th, we held an event at Wild Coffee called “Research Remixed” where we first shared our report on student housing. Throughout the evening we shared a summary of our findings and mixed the event with an open mic poetry slam. It was well attended and included a presentation by the Intercultural Association of Victoria (ICA) and its Facilitator of Refugee Volunteer Support Services, Sharmarke Dubow.

Since then, VIPIRG has been finding avenues to contact with various media outlets and organizations to raise awareness of our recommendations. Our Outreach Coordinator; Dakota McGovern, was interviewed in the Martlet to talk about what recommendations we have for the government and university. Our report was received a response from the minister of Advanced Education and Services, Melanie Mark, and we also met one on one with the Associate Vice-President of Student Affairs; Jim Dunsdon, to discuss the findings.

This upcoming year we still have a lot of work to do! Alongside the Vancouver Island Tennant Action Network (VTAG) we are organizing an event in the middle of February to educate students on what their Tenant rights are and how to advocate for their tenant rights. This event will be held in on February 8th and you can find more information about the event on our Facebook page:

Finally, VIPIRG will be looking into means of raising awareness of UVics “Emergency Loan” program which could potentially help people pay their rent if government loans are running late.

Best of luck for the upcoming year to community members and post-secondary students at UVic and elsewhere and please contact research@vipirg.ca with any questions on this on any other research projects and ideas. We look forward to seeing you at our next event!