Warm Night

Sadly, Familiar Isn’t it?

Warm Night was created in the fall of 2013 by a very small group of friends who were looking for a way to contribute to the community.

Our humble beginnings started as a small soup kitchen outside the doors of the Union Gospel Mission on Hastings Street in Downtown Vancouver on that Christmas Eve.  You see, like many shelters, there isn’t a scheduled meal service Christmas Eve.  We pooled together, raised a few dollars from friends and bought enough gifts for everyone who joined us under our candlelit tents for a warm meal.  By the end of the evening and scraping the bottom of the pot I believe we served well over 150 guests.

Every year since we have put together our special Warm Night meal provision which has evolved and grown to something quite incredible. To date, we have provided Warm Night meals and gifts to 2,500 people serving our now famous Italian Brunch all served to sit down table side.

Along with this, we are blessed to have our friends at Sunflower Fashion who have hand made well over 5,000 beautiful Polar Fleece Blankets which we have donated to the Lookout Society.  Many of these blankets cover there 3,000 beds throughout the lower mainland. This year though is different, we lost a dear friend in Tat Lau who along with his brother Peter and their families made the contribution and sewed those blankets.  Although the tradition from the Lau family remains, we honor our friend Tat more than ever this year.

This year 2018 we will be serving at the Lookout Society’s Gateway/Livingroom location on Powel Street where we will have gifts and blankets for our guests when they leave after being filled with a wonderful meal ending with sweet treats.  We expect anywhere from 250-300 guests for brunch which we will serve again on Christmas Eve Day. To make our events even more special, we have had the support of Bambino’s Catering who bring their large support trailer where the food magic begins.

If you would like to join us, we would love to have your help however please note we can only accommodate a total of 25 volunteers, so please let us know asap.  Last year we had to turn down over 50 people.  If you can’t make it but would like to help, we do accept gifts like Socks, Underwear, Gloves, Toiletries both male and female.  If you would like to make a small financial donation, Safeway, IGA, or Save-On-Foods gift cards are great as we work with our local stores to help us, and we do most of our shopping with them.

Please send all inquiries to [email protected] or call Phil Calla @ 604-833-4677.  In the next week, we will have someone to help coordinate gifts and donations.  From there we will be looking for a couple of key team leads.  Feel free to step up.

Thank you for making Warm Night Happen………..It’s a very good thing!