Homeless advocates arrive in Kelowna in support of Leon Avenue tent city

Members of a provincial advocacy group for homeless people are making a stop in downtown Kelowna this afternoon as part of a tour of communities in the Shuswap, Okanagan and Kootenays.

The Alliance Against Displacement has a media conference planned along with the visit in support of the tent city on Leon Avenue in Kelowna's downtown today, Nov. 12.

The group, originally called the Social Housing Coalition/Alliance according to its website, was created in 2013 to highlight the need for social housing.

The Kelowna visit is part of a Tent City Tour that started earlier this month in Kamloops that “began the work of building a province-wide poor people's movement,” states the group's Facebook page. Stops were also planned in Chase, Salmon Arm and Vernon on the way to Kelowna, with the group moving on to the Kootenays after today.

On Oct. 23 Alliance Against Displacement launched a GoFundMe campaign aimed at raising $6,000 to send 10 homeless leaders from Maple Ridge, Coquitlam, Surrey, Vancouver and Nanaimo to tour the Okanagan and Kootenays. As of today, $900 had been raised.

“(Alliance Against Displacement) situates the current housing crisis in B.C. within the larger political and economic forces of displacement that are inherent to colonialism and capitalism,” the group states on its website. “To address the housing crisis at its roots requires an engagement with these two interwoven systems of power.”

Members of the group said during a CBC radio interview while in Kamloops that they had brought seven homeless leaders and four advocates on the tour and had met with about 100 homeless people in that city.

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