February 5th, 2026, at Kitsilano Neighbourhood House, Vancouver
This blog is based on a field note from the Vancouver site’s neighbourhood walk, which formed the basis of our place-based audit, aimed at helping us understand how the neighbourhood of Kitsilano on the city’s west side is experienced by people with dementia and their care partners. This was the first of two neighbourhood audits in Kitsilano. During each, we met at a local community organization, walked on routes designed to represent the neighbourhood’s commercial areas, green and blue spaces, then reconvened to discuss our experiences and share a meal. Our team included our Principal Investigator, Alison Phinney, our Research Coordinator Paulina Malcolm, and Mattie Lewis our Research Assistant. The participants included a number of residents of Kitsilano, including people with dementia, care partners, volunteer “buddies,” and a staff member of the Kitsilano Neighbourhood House, the community hub that hosted our audit. These included (not their real names): Shari, Craig, Annette, Ruby, Colleen, and Jen.
As we gathered at Kits House, waiting for people to arrive, it became apparent how that organization itself and some of the programs it hosts, for example its Memory Buddy Program, which pairs people with dementia with community members, helps people retain a sense of belonging in the wider neighbourhood. It also helped us reflect on a neighbourhood itself as not just a space to navigate as part of their daily routines, but a space where people could connect and find enjoyment. Though one woman with dementia, Helen, was unable to attend today, as she’s recently moved outside of the neighbourhood to an assisted living facility, our interactions with her daughter, Shari, helped us reflect on how Helen’s longstanding sense of belonging in this neighbourhood, and her sense of familiarity during her walks with her memory buddy, must have made being out and about feel safer and more enjoyable, despite being relatively advanced in her dementia journey. It helped us reflect on how to maintain a sense of belonging and familiarity throughout transitions to her new setting.
Shari (the daughter of Helen, a woman with dementia), was the first participant to enter the Van City meeting room at Kits House, where the group was convening to discuss the placed-based audit that would take place in the neighbourhood around Kits House that afternoon, which was an unseasonably warm, dry day in early February. After Mattie and I introduced ourselves (in my case reintroduced, as I’d met her, her mother and Annette, Helen’s “memory buddy” previously as part of another initiative), Shari shared some of the history of the Kits House organization and its buildings, including how Kits House had taken over the attached building next door, which was formerly a Greek Orthodox Church in the mid-seventies, and subsequently built the current building on space which had been used for child care. She talked about how her father had worked as a driver bringing participants to and from Kits House, and that she herself had participated in Kits House programming as a young person.
Shari had brought some flyers for Kits Houses’ caregiver support group, which she’d helped initiate. She described how she was co-facilitating the group with Jen, the coordinator of that program, which had evolved out of the memory buddy program, which Jen coordinates as part of her role within the Kits House Seniors program. Jen had told me previously that Shari had sought out and sometimes attended a caregiver support group at another Neighbourhood House and had brought forward the idea that Kits House itself would benefit from its own group.
All of the participants we were awaiting except one (Colleen, who Paulina was bringing from the city of Burnaby, just east of Vancouver) lived nearby in the Kitsilano Neighbourhood, and were associated with the buddy program, which provides 1:1 peer-based support to people with dementia and cognitive challenges to help them participate in Kits House programming and stay active in their neighbourhoods (often by going walking). This initiative was formed as part of the Building Capacity Project, an asset-based community development approach to supporting social participation of people with dementia, and funded as a pilot project through Canada’s National Dementia Strategy. The buddy program itself grew out of a realization that people with dementia or memory challenges that came to Kits House would benefit from individualized support to continue connecting with its programs, and with the surrounding neighbourhood. Though founded on one-to-one support relationships, these have often evolved into deeper bonds, so that volunteers and people with dementia consider each other part of the others ongoing social network.
In addition to Helen’s memory buddy Annette, our group also included Craig (a late thirty something man who’d experienced a head injury), and his memory buddy Ruby (a University of British Columbia student). Lisa, another woman with dementia from the buddy program was scheduled to participate but we learned from Jen that Lisa had let her know that morning she was not up to doing the walk today, but would hopefully participate later in the month at a second event along with Shirley (another woman with dementia associated with the buddy program) and her long-time friend Andrew. Colleen is part of the Dementia Co-Creation Society program in Burnaby, which like the Memory Buddy program was part of the Building Capacity project. Thus, all participants are part of a network of programs that our current research team had supported to implement.
At we waited and talked some more, Craig and Ruby arrived, as well as Annette. They all recalled meeting each other at the previous event and said hello. We continued to chat until Paulina and Colleen arrived, and then after they’d introduced themselves, launched into our orientation of the neighbourhood audit, as well as shared some of the findings from the first phase of the research, which showed that “getting around” was an important issue for people with dementia, hence something we wanted to know more about today, as we walked with people through their neighbourhood on one of the two routes we’d designed: one option going south along Vine St., from our location at 7th and Vine to a portion of the Arbutus Greenway running parallel to 10th avenue, also including a commercial stretch of Broadway (9th) Avenue; the other option going north along Vine to a commercial stretch along 4th avenue, before coming north before intersecting with another portion of the Arbutus Greenway. We explained that as we walked, we wanted to understand people’s experiences with navigating the sidewalks, feelings of belonging, as well as their memories that were connected to certain neighbourhood landmarks.
After our orientation, the walking groups sorted themselves out. Paulina and Mattie would be accompanying Colleen along the Broadway route, and Alison and I would be going with Helen, Shari, Annette, Craig and Ruby along the 4th Avenue Route. Jen came with our group, along with her dog Java, a very friendly brown lab.
As we lingered in the room, waiting for the groups to gather themselves, and Annette went outside to unlock her three-wheeled e-bike, Alison asked Ruby about her program at UBC, and they identified a person they both knew (as professor who is Paulina’s supervisor). Shari mentioned that, unlike the neighbourhood surrounding Mount St. Joseph’s Hospital where her mom was, which was built on a swamp and has very uneven pavement, her mother Helen’s new neighbourhood is adjacent to a park with wide gravel paths, and talked about how they were able to go out for a walk.
As we were heading outside, and also in reference to one of the emerging findings identified in our slide show (about how people’s daily lives involve not only managing practical things about their routine, but also entail a fair amount of emotion management), Shari told me that she had sought out counselling for her mom after she was diagnosed with dementia, but she’d been unable to access any help. She also alluded to other challenges that made her role as a care partner more difficult, and made her more isolated, e.g. how their neighbours either did not know how to be supportive or shied away from becoming involved. She also mentioned some challenges Helen faced as she was out and about (i.e., problems with depth perception which had contributed to some falls; and not being able to reach groceries on the high shelves at the IGA on Broadway).
During the walk itself, I was initially walking with Annette, and asking her about her walks with Helen, as the others went ahead. At an earlier event (a focus group for the Memory Buddy program) I’d learned that she and Helen enjoyed each other’s company while walking regularly in the neighbourhood. Like Shari, she talked about how one time Helen had fallen while going off a curb because of a problem with her vision. Along 4th Avenue, Shari pointed to places that brought back memories, including a Greek restaurant that had been there for decades. At this point Shari and I were walking behind Annette, Jen and Java, the three of them walking gamely along the narrow uneven sidewalks, which were just wide enough for them to navigate while walking side by side.
As we turned south on Arbutus, Shari bumped into a friend and Jen moved ahead to catch up with Craig and Ruby and moved further ahead of Annette and I. (Shari told the friend we were on a neighbourhood audit to see what needed to be changed and her friend, who was just now able to walk the neighbourhood on her own after an accident that occurred several years ago, accompanied by a support dog, said “everything!”. (Shari told me that during the period her friend was unable to go out on her own, her mom had helped out by taking her out for walks).
As it turned out, we had turned off 4th
As we passed by the corner of 6th and Arbutus, Shari reminisced that the coffee shop there used to be a corner store (one of three in the area), and close enough to her elementary school (which is no longer there), that she and her friends could escape at lunch time and come down to the store to buy candy. Their goal was to buy enough pop tops (or whatever they were called) that they could redeem them for a fudge sundae at the Whitespot restaurant along 4th Ave. When she was a bit older, she’d worked there for a spell.
As we walked along, we came to the community garden, and Shari told us her mom had been an original member. When I asked Annette if she and Helen walked by there on their usual walks, Annette said she’d been unaware of Helen’s connection to the garden, but that they often did walk by Delamonte Park which was the green space south of the garden, along the diagonal Arbutus corridor passage that we were headed towards.
As we crossed the intersection, a motorcycle approached. Though it was going too quickly, Annette held her ground, gesturing to the driver, as Craig also stood watch, making sure things were safe as we crossed. Having navigated that situation successfully, the group made its way along the Greenway diagonal beside Delamonte Park. That space elicited a number of memories, including its former status as a brewery (Okeefe), as a hangout where young people partied, and as the place where someone dumped a bunch of live chickens. When Shari mentioned that, Annette responded that she heard that too, through a neighbourhood facebook group where pet owners tried to find other people to look after their pets. Later we reflected how Shari and Craig as “hosts” of the walk, had taken ownership over the route, as Shari told stories, and Craig explained other possible routes, e.g. down to Granville Island, and made sure people stayed safe while we crossed a busy intersection.
Passing the park, and turning west at 7th, it was a fairly short walk back to Kits House. After Paulina and Mattie and Colleen returned, we started the debrief. When Paulina asked Shari if she could relate Helen’s perspective about walking in the neighbourhood, Shari at first said she was more focussed on her own perspective, as the walk brought back a lot of her own memories. Given Shari’s deep connection to the neighbourhood, and her comments about her family history in the area (including that her mom was an original member of the community garden) I asked Annette her thoughts about whether that sense of familiarity would be comforting for Helen as she walked through her own neighbourhood. Annette said again she was unaware of Helen’s history with the garden, but said that their walks past Delamonte Park had elicited a reminiscence from Helen about being a Montessori teacher (where a portable building from the school used to be located).
Annette observed that routine and predictability were important so that the person could know the potential obstacles, and the person with them could too. For example, when Helen sees a reflection off standing water, or experiences a crack in the pavement, she overcompensates and could fall, so she shouldn’t walk alone. (Jen agreed and mentioned a time when she was walking with another volunteer who wasn’t aware of Helen’s challenges when it was dusk, i.e. with bad lighting, and she had also fallen). Shari also returned to her mom’s difficulty in the IGA grocery store, one time falling, perhaps because of a perceptual issue, or a visual hallucination. She had also mentioned the problem of older or shorter people needing help getting items off higher shelves.
As we left the room, Paulina and Helen talked about connecting at another point to talk about Helen’s routine. Annette also said it was sad that she and Helen would no longer be able to do their walks. Shari’s initial response was that they could walk together up at Quilchena Park, though the gravel paths there might not be navigable for Annette’s scooter. Later Shari said she hoped Helen would be able to participate in our next neighbourhood audit later in the month. It would be good to get Helen’s perspective on the importance of feeling a sense of predictability, and of familiarity and connection to her neighbourhood, and of maintaining a semblance of this now that she has moved.
By Eric Macnaughton, Project Manager, University of British Columbia, Vancouver