At the Odd Fellows hall on West 8th Avenue at Granville Street, Sunday mornings see a volunteer-driven outreach program that provides the homeless and food insecure with a two-hour window of compassion and acceptance: a free breakfast, clothes and toothpaste, and myriad other items.
The program is an extension of outreach efforts that began in 2020, when the hall provided shelter on roughly 30 particularly cold winter nights. A long-standing charity was rebranded as the Three Links Foundation in 2023 to coordinate the breakfasts and was bolstered by government grants and individual donors.
The first breakfast in July 2023 had six attendees—the numbers now exceed 100 each week. It’s an increase that’s reflected across the region, as a Metro Vancouver-wide homelessness count conducted in late 2023 found a 32 per cent increase in the amount of people identifying as homeless over a three-year span.
“Along the Broadway corridor, there is virtually nothing for the homeless,” says Walter Wells, an Odd Fellows member and Three Links founder along with Joe Van Snellenberg and Les Garbutt. “We are learning as we go, but we’ve grown too much. We can’t handle 100 people, and I don’t think we’re done growing.”
The program is supported by the JW Marriott Parq Vancouver hotel and its chef Kunal Dighe, who oversees more than 70 pounds of food delivery and prep when I visit the Odd Fellows Hall in late September. Purebread contributes free baked goods, and nearby grocers donate food that’ll soon expire.
“If you want to make someone happy, you can do it by going from the plate to the stomach and then right into their heart,” Dighe says. “The guests are always thankful and very grateful.”
Morgan has lived in a single-room occupancy (SRO) facility in Strathcona for six months. Prior to that, the 45-year-old was homeless for three years. A government assistance cheque that’s gone in days, navigating soup kitchens across Vancouver, and avoiding confrontation or death—this is Morgan’s reality.
“There is a lot of starvation, and you quickly learn the rule of threes: you can survive three minutes without oxygen, about three days without water, and about 30 days without food, and I’ve tested every one of those,” he says.
The flip side to Morgan’s routine comes at Odd Fellows every Sunday morning, when he gets a welcome respite from the stress and hypervigilance of street life. The program is one of the few—if not only—outreach programs on the West Side that isn’t run by a government agency or faith-based group. The Odd Fellows is a fraternal order that operates outside of religion or politics and draws its volunteer complement through members, online postings, or word of mouth.
It’s precisely that absence of religion that attracts Ferly to the group. A 65-year-old member of the Cree First Nation, he has attended other outreach offerings but says he wants sustenance, not a sermon.
“That’s not for me,” says Ferly, who lives in a Mount Pleasant SRO. “Here they don’t preach to you, the people are very friendly, and the volunteers are great. Everybody gets along with everybody.”
He comes from a large family of 12 and describes his father as an ordinarily good man who turned violent when drunk. Ferly left Saskatchewan in 1966, and addiction led him into a life of theft. A brain aneurysm six years ago was his moment of clarity. Upon leaving the hospital, he found catharsis in flames: he lit a fire and burned his crack pipe and every phone number attached to his past life.
He quit everything, right down to cigarettes, cold turkey. “I come here, and it puts my mind at ease,” he says. “I want nothing to do with that life anymore.”
Ferly’s backstory doesn’t surprise Wells. One attendee told Wells his wife and children died in a car accident and he could never put the pieces back together. Another told Wells he was a serial bank robber who was in and out of prison for close to three decades. “There are some bad people who’ve made some poor choices in life, but it’s a whole spectrum of why they’ve ended up on the streets,” he says.
A cursory look through the hall on a sunny, late-September morning suggests the vast majority of the roughly 100 attendees are well into middle age and beyond. It’s a pattern Les Garbutt has seen since day one.
Like Wells, Garbutt has volunteered since the program’s inception. From the outset, most attendees were older and local to the Fairview area. He believes many of them stayed in the neighbourhood to avoid more volatile settings elsewhere in the city.
Weekly breakfasts now see attendees from across Vancouver and Burnaby.
There’s been pushback from neighbours and businesses, but most came around after attending a breakfast. Some have donated to the foundation. Others will never change their views on homelessness.
“It’s the old adage of someone who was born on third base and automatically thinks they hit a triple,” Garbutt says. “They think everyone should be able to make a go of it, but it’s not like that.”
Greeter Andrew McLellan is tasked with welcoming people as they enter, and he monitors activity outside the hall. There have been a few incendiary incidents where he verbally deescalated the situation, but McLellan notes that attendees are the first to self-police conflicts in order to maintain communal order.
That sense of community comes across vividly as the group leaves for the day. Not one person fails to thank McLellan as they depart. Many say they came for the food at first but now come for companionship.
“This is a path that I could’ve been on for a while, just based on the people I was hanging around with—some of them are addicts now; others I’ve lost,” says McLellan, a long-standing senior manager with Arc’teryx. “I’ve had some good breaks in my life.”
Fifteen minutes out from the breakfast’s conclusion, Morgan and Ferly gather their belongings and plot where the day’s next meal will come from. They both acknowledge it will be a meal and a meal only, unlike what they’ve come to experience in South Granville.
“Do I come for the cereal? No. I come because I love this guy sitting next to me, I love this guy sitting across from me, and I love this place,” Morgan says. “The way that they treat us with humanity is difficult to put into words.”
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