Homeless hockey video humanizes Kelowna’s street-entrenched population

Kelowna's Gospel Mission hosted a street hockey game on Leon Avenue in the city's downtown core this past fall in order to show the world that homeless people are not so different than the rest of us.

The event was filmed by Solid Rock Video and the company produced a 2.5 minute video of the event called Humanizing the Homeless through Hockey.

Today, Dec. 17, it was posted to Vimeo.

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“I just wanted to humanize homelessness and show we are all the same,” Michael Morrison, the Director of Development for the Gospel Mission, told iNFOnews.ca. “As kids, maybe we all had the same dreams and we were pushed off our journey either right or left but, when it comes down to it, we are all the same.”

The Gospel Mission brought together community members and West Kelowna Warriors players to join in the game with people living in its homeless shelter.

“People experiencing homelessness need to be seen and heard, not as someone who is homeless but as a person with fears, hopes and dreams,” text in the video reads. “Hockey seemed a great way to show, as kids, we all had the same dreams.”


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Rob Munro

Rob Munro has a long history in journalism after starting an underground newspaper in Whitehorse called the Yukon Howl in 1980. He spent five years at the 100 Mile Free Press, starting in the darkroom, moving on to sports and news reporting before becoming the advertising manager. He came to Kelowna in 1989 as a reporter for the Kelowna Daily Courier, and spent the 1990s mostly covering city hall. For most of the past 20 years he worked full time for the union representing newspaper workers throughout B.C. He’s returned to his true love of being a reporter with a special focus on civic politics

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