Category: Updates

Since the mid 80s, the Crisis Centre of BC has called our current building home. The space on East Broadway has seen thousands of volunteers trained, hundreds of thousands of calls answered, and countless moments of connection between people in crisis and the people who showed up to help. It has character. It has history. It also has its quirks (many of them).

Our building is aging. We do our best to maintain it, and we are proud of what we have built within its walls, but we are clear-eyed about the reality: our current home will not serve us indefinitely. The question is not whether we will need a new space, but when, and what that space should be.

What we have been doing is asking the question: what kind of space does the Crisis Centre need to serve our community well for the next 50 years?

That is a gift from the donors and supporters who came before us, and it gives us something rare in the non-profit world: genuine choice. We sit within Vancouver’s Broadway Plan corridor, an area undergoing significant transformation as the city plans for decades of new housing, jobs, and transit-oriented development. That context creates opportunities we might not otherwise have, and means that how and where we position ourselves for the future deserves thoughtful consideration.

We are not ready to make announcements, nor are we launching a capital campaign. What we have been doing is asking the question: what kind of space does the Crisis Centre need to serve our community well for the next 50 years?

We have started and will continue this exploration, and we are approaching it with the same care we bring to everything else: thoughtfully, with our community in mind, and with a deep commitment to ensuring that whatever comes next allows us to keep doing this work for generations to come. If you believe in that future, your support, in any form, helps make it possible.

Each year when we publish our Annual Report, we take a moment to look back on what we’ve focused on over the past year, and the impact of our work.

Between April 2025 and March 2026:

💙 11,570 youth participated in our self-care and wellness programs
💙 3,144 adults completed our training programs
💙 1,697 service providers and community members received suicide response training
💙 40,754 calls and texts were made and answered across 9-8-8 and our provincial network
💙 216 people were supported by our suicide bereavement program

Each of these numbers represents a conversation, a person reaching out for help, and an opportunity to meet the human experience of suicide and crisis with compassion, respect, and understanding.

Throughout this past year, we raised our voices on issues that affect the communities where we work and live. Our advocacy for compassionate, flexible, responsive crisis and mental health systems is rooted in knowledge we have gained over 57 years of frontline service. We know that bridge barriers prevent bridge suicides. We know that the best way to face crisis is the right response, at the right time, from the right people, for every person, every time. And we know that when someone calls 9-1-1 in mental health crisis, what happens next matters.

We’re so grateful to our funders, members, and supporters for allowing us to do this work and make a difference every day.

You can read our 2025 / 2026 Annual Report here. If you are compelled to do so, we invite you to join us – raise your voice, take one of our training programs, or make a donation to support our work.

The opening scenario is a fictionalized composite inspired by the real experiences. It does not represent any specific individual.

It is 2 a.m. on a Tuesday. A person sits alone in their apartment, the city quiet outside their window. They have been struggling for weeks: with loss, with isolation, with thoughts that have grown darker than they can manage on their own. Tonight, something has shifted. They need help. They reach for their phone.

They dial 9-1-1. It is the only number they can think of. It is the number we all grow up knowing.

The call connects, and the dispatcher on the other end is professional, caring, and doing their job well. But their job is built for emergencies of a different kind: fires, accidents, medical crises requiring immediate physical intervention. A person in psychological distress, alone at 2 a.m., needing someone to talk them through the night, that is not a gap in the dispatcher’s compassion. It is a gap in the system.

A police unit is sent. It is the available response. It is not always the right one.

When someone calls 9-1-1, they have three choices: police, fire, or ambulance. For a person experiencing a mental health crisis or having thoughts of suicide, none of these may be the right first response. And yet, right now in British Columbia, there is no other pathway.

The Crisis Centre believes that must change.

We are advocating for a fourth option within 9-1-1: a dedicated pathway that connects people in crisis directly to trained crisis line responders when police, fire, or ambulance is not the most appropriate first response. Not as a replacement for emergency services, but as the right response for a different kind of emergency.

A practical, proven pathway for crisis response

The Crisis Centre’s crisis lines already resolve the vast majority of calls without any need for police or ambulance dispatch. Only 0.28% of calls to the Centre from Provincial crisis lines require an in-person dispatch. This extremely low number is a sign that what we do is working.

Crisis responders listen, de-escalate, assess risk, and connect people to supports, often helping someone through the hardest moment of their life without a single vehicle being dispatched. A fourth option within 9-1-1 would extend that kind of response to more people, through the system they already know how to reach.

We aren’t alone in this work

Ecomm 9-1-1 and the Canadian Mental Health Association of BC are also working towards better options for people in emotional and mental health crisis. Building a fourth option requires bringing emergency response, crisis response, and community-based mental health into an integrated system. It is complex work, and it will take time. But the need is clear, the evidence is strong, and the conversations are taking place. We will keep making the case until the right response is available to everyone who needs it.

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Crisis lines are available across British Columbia 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. If you or someone you know needs help, please call:

• 9-8-8 (call or text)
• 310-6789 (no area code needed)
• 1-800-SUICIDE / 1-800-784-2433
• 604-872-3311

Emma’s account is drawn from her testimony to Vancouver City Council.

Emma is in the ninth grade. She lives next to the Granville Street Bridge. Earlier this year, she stood before Vancouver City Council and asked a question that no child should have to ask: “Since when do we put a price tag on human life?”

Emma has witnessed tragedy on that bridge since she was 12. She has watched people in crisis on the railing. She has seen people jump. She described lying in bed at night, terrified of what she might hear. She told the council she can barely keep her blinds open anymore because of what she might see outside her window. Those experiences, she said, do not leave you. They steal your sense of safety and change how you feel in your own home.

Emma is not alone. Residents, families, workers on Granville Island, and community members along the bridge corridor have been raising these concerns for years. Her testimony brought painful clarity to a debate that has gone on far too long. The Granville Street Bridge averages approximately 2.6 suicide deaths every year. Funding for barriers has been delayed, made contingent on other levels of government, and at one point removed from the City’s capital plan entirely.

The evidence has never been in question. Barriers were installed on the Ironworkers Memorial Bridge in 2015 and on the Burrard Street Bridge in 2017. There have been no suicide deaths on either bridge since. Research consistently confirms the same pattern: physical barriers at high-risk locations reduce suicides, and people do not simply move to another site. The intervention works. The barrier creates time: for pause, for connection, for help to arrive. And 90% of people who survive a suicidal crisis do not go on to die by suicide. That means a bridge barrier can be the difference between a life that ends and a life that thrives.

The Crisis Centre appeared before Vancouver City Council on June 3, 2026, alongside community members, health officials, and business leaders from Granville Island, to support Councillor Dominato’s motion to restore barrier funding to the capital plan. The motion passed unanimously. That outcome matters, and is the result of years of sustained advocacy by many people, including those at the Crisis Centre who have worked for barriers at every opportunity. Even more hopefully, the City is starting stakeholder work on bridge barrier design, and has invited the Crisis Centre to be a part of making the bridge barriers a reality. Our work made the Burrard Street Bridge barriers happen. We will make the Granville Bridge barriers happen too.

Beyond Granville

The Granville Street Bridge is only one part of a larger picture. Across the region and the province, suicide means prevention remains an afterthought in infrastructure planning. Advocates and community members must fight for it project by project, bridge by bridge. The Crisis Centre believes the solution lies at the systems level. Barriers should be a design requirement from the beginning, embedded in building codes and architectural standards, expected as a baseline whenever a new bridge is designed or significantly retrofitted. Suicide prevention should not depend on someone having to ask for it. It should already be there.

Emma has already written to the Prime Minister’s office and received a response indicating her concerns have been forwarded to federal ministers. A ninth grader should not have to carry this. But her question, and the courage it took to ask it in front of council, captures something we have long known: we have the evidence, we have the tools, and every day we wait is a day we could have prevented a death.

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Crisis lines are available across British Columbia 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. If you or someone you know needs help, please call:

• 9-8-8 (call or text)
• 310-6789 (no area code needed)
• 1-800-SUICIDE / 1-800-784-2433
• 604-872-3311

This story is a fictionalized composite inspired by the real experiences. It does not represent any specific individual.

By the time a Crisis Centre responder picked up the call, after just one ring, the caller had already been told “no” in several different ways.

She was in crisis. She had left an unsafe living situation and had nowhere stable to go. She was exhausted, frightened, and trying to make it through the night. She had called a housing service, but there were no immediate beds available. She had been referred to counselling, but the waitlist was months long. She had reached out to another service, but she did not meet the eligibility criteria.

No one was cruel. Everyone wanted to help. But every door seemed to require something she did not have: a fixed address, a formal referral, an appointment, transportation, time, or the capacity to keep telling her story again and again.

On the other end of the line, one of our crisis responders listened. They helped her slow her breathing. They asked careful questions about safety. They stayed with her as she described what had happened, what she had tried, and what she was afraid might happen next.

The responder could hear the crisis. They could also hear the deeper problem. The crisis was not only what was happening inside this person. The crisis was also the maze around her.

Often resolving a crisis is painfully practical: a place to sleep, a ride across town, a few hundred dollars for rent, a safe way to leave, or a person who can stay until morning.

The crisis was not only what was happening inside this person. The crisis was also the maze around her.

Every day, the Crisis Centre answers calls and texts from people at their lowest points. We know what crisis looks like. We know what helps. We know that a conversation can interrupt panic, reduce isolation, support safety planning, and help someone stay alive.

We also know that a conversation cannot, on its own, create housing, shorten a waitlist, remove a financial barrier, or redesign an emergency response system. That is why systems improvement is not separate from our work. It grows directly out of it.

One priority is to do the right thing: public systems where people experiencing a mental health or suicidal crisis must receive the right response, at the right time, from the right people. An emergency response system that defaults to police cannot provide a health-oriented response to a health-oriented problem.

Another priority is means restriction: advocating for changes to the built environment that reduce access to lethal means and help make communities suicide-safer. Bridge barriers and other protective infrastructure interrupt lethal decisions and make it safer to provide the right response to a suicidal crisis.

The Crisis Centre exists for the moment of crisis. But we also work for a world in which fewer people are left to reach that point alone.

As an organisation, we are there when people call us when they are in crisis. Our mission is to ensure that when any person in crisis reaches out anywhere, to a friend, a doctor, a hospital, a crisis line, 9-1-1, or a community service, the response they receive helps them.

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Crisis lines are available across British Columbia 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. If you or someone you know needs help, please call:

• 9-8-8 (call or text)
• 310-6789 (no area code needed)
• 1-800-SUICIDE / 1-800-784-2433
• 604-872-3311

This August, we had the pleasure of celebrating the incredible volunteers who make our work possible. At our annual Summer Jamboree, we gathered to connect, eat, play some fun party games, and celebrate our amazing volunteers!

We are deeply grateful to the many local businesses, organizations, and community partners who generously donated in-kind gifts and experiences for our volunteer prize draw. Your support helped make the event extra special and demonstrated the strength of community collaboration in recognizing those who give their time to support others.

We would like to say a heartfelt thank you to:

• Arts Club Theatre Company for donating play tickets
• Athena Fencing Club for donating fencing lessons
• Ballet BC for donating ballet tickets
• Brassneck Brewery for donating 8 $50 gift cards to Brassneck and the Magnet
• Breka Bakery & Café for donating a $50 gift card
• Burgoo Bistro for donating a $75 gift card
• Capilano Suspension Bridge Park for donating 4 tickets
• The Cultch for donating 2 tickets
• Cycle City Tours for donating 2 half-day bike rentals
• Everything Wine for donating a gift basket
• Pacific Coastal Airlines for donating a round trip travel voucher for 2 travellers
• Rhythm City Productions for donating 2 classes
• Rollerland for donating 4 tickets
• Rio Theatre for donating 8 movie tickets
• Vancouver Art Gallery for donating 2 VIP tickets
• Vancouver Mysteries for donating 2 tickets

Our hard-working volunteers are so appreciative of these amazing prizes.

Here are a few photos from our Jamboree get-together.

I work with superheroes for a living. I’m an FX Artist. When my nieces and nephews ask what that means, I tell them I’m the one who gives superheroes their special powers.

That might sound playful, but it’s serious work. In movies, powers don’t appear by accident. Someone decides what a character can do, when they discover it, and whether they learn how to use that power before the story turns tragic. Powers only matter if they show up at the right moment.

My understanding of that didn’t come from my work alone. It came from my family.

My mom’s father died by suicide in the 1970s. She wasn’t told directly. She learned from another kid on a playground. There was no careful explanation, no adult conversation, no protection for a child receiving news that would shape her life forever.

That loss echoed through our family. Suicidal ideation touched more than one generation. Throughout my childhood, my mom sometimes had to step away from family life to take care of herself. Healing took time. It wasn’t neat or linear.

In my family, suicide was never taboo. It was talked about openly. That openness shaped me. It made the topic speakable, even when it was painful. It also taught me something important early on: silence doesn’t protect people. Tools do.

Outside my family, suicide kept appearing in my life. A student at my school. Someone I went to church with as a teenager. A former teacher I deeply admired, someone who created an inclusive classroom at a time when I was being bullied. That loss stayed with me the most. Over time, the number grew. Four people. And then more.

Eventually, I found my way to the Crisis Centre of BC. At first, I thought helping meant responding at the very end of the story. Instead, I learned something more powerful: prevention is about equipping people earlier.

Through training like safeTALK and ASIST, I learned that one of the most important “powers” you can give someone is language. The ability to ask a hard question plainly: “Are you thinking about suicide?” I learned that caring deeply isn’t a reason to avoid that question. It’s the reason to ask it.

Those tools changed how I show up in the world. I’ve used them with friends who were struggling. I’ve seen how much it matters when someone feels heard instead of alone. I’ve seen how a single, honest question can interrupt the story before it turns tragic.

That’s why I support the work of the Crisis Centre of BC, and why I now volunteer as a Youth Educator. But volunteering isn’t the point. The point is power. The kind of power that helps people notice what’s happening inside themselves. The kind that helps them name distress, ask for help, and recognize the current before they’re pulled under.

As an FX Artist, I give superheroes their powers.
Through the Crisis Centre of BC, people are given real ones.

Training, youth education, and crisis intervention don’t happen by accident. They exist because people choose to support them. If this idea of giving people their powers resonates with you, I invite you to support the work of the Crisis Centre of BC, take one of our training programs, sign up to be a monthly donor or one-time donor, or become a volunteer yourself. Your generosity helps ensure these tools are there when someone needs them, at exactly the right moment.

* This story is shared with permission. Some identifying details, including my name, have been changed to protect privacy and confidentiality.