Our History

The Society was founded in 1981 by a group of Anglicans, most of them from Christ Church Cathedral in Vancouver. That year the Cathedral held a series of workshops encouraging participants to identify their particular gifts and callings to be of service in the world. At one workshop, parishioner Hilda Gregory stood up and issued a challenge to others to join her in helping to house low-income people living downtown. Anne McCullum, Cynthia Llewellyn, Lil Thirkell, Pat Black, and Adrian Ross attended the first meeting in Hilda’s apartment. They pooled their money, and with a kitty of $2,000 they set out to see what they could do. They began with no expertise or experience in housing.

In the years leading up to Expo 86, tenants in rundown lodgings in the old commercial hotels along Granville Street were being turned out as the hotels were renovated for tourists. The 127 Society saw this as a social justice issue and got involved. The first tenants of the Society came from those single room occupancy hotels (SROs.) They were mostly men, typically former loggers, miners, and fishermen, unable to handle any longer the physical demands of their work, their living habits often shaped by the extreme seasonality of their work, often without families, and sometimes battling addictions.

Today the Society houses 334 people in three apartment buildings. The Society partnered with the City of Vancouver and CMHC on its first building, old Jubilee House, which opened in 1986 and closed in 2016; with BC Housing and CMHC on retrofitting heritage apartment building Brookland Court, which opened in 1989; with BC Housing and the City of Vancouver on The Wellspring, which opened in 1997; and with the City of Vancouver, Brenhill Developments, and BC Housing on new Jubilee House which opened in 2016 to replace the original Jubilee House.