Liz Evans is the leader featured in 4REAL Vancouver. She is the Executive Director and Founder of the Portland Hotel Society, an organization aimed at providing housing, advocacy and support to people in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside community. PHS was formed in 1993.

Liz graduated from Ottawa University wi...

Liz Evans is the leader featured in 4REAL Vancouver. She is the Executive Director and Founder of the Portland Hotel Society, an organization aimed at providing housing, advocacy and support to people in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside community. PHS was formed in 1993.

Liz graduated from Ottawa University with a BScN (Nursing) after which time she worked in psychiatry. In 1991 Liz began her work at the Portland Hotel, a 70-room SRO hotel in the heart of the DTES. She and her colleagues formed the Portland Hotel Society, which has since been cited as the first of its kind in many studies, as a successful model for housing and bringing support to individuals without any other housing alternatives.

The Society operates supported hotels, supported housing, and a range of programs and services including a low-income community bank, a dental clinic, a community café and laundromat, a drug-users life-skills centre, a needle exchange and North America’s first supervised injection site, in addition to a detox and housing treatment program.

The Portland Hotel has been cited as a model for addressing the needs of challenging resident groups by the Provincial Commission on Housing Options, and has been the subject of positive media attention at the local, provincial and national levels. This coverage includes a documentary, “Dinner at the Portland” (1993), produced for CBC Television’s Man Alive; a two-hour special presentation, “Drugs: New Options” (March 1997), shown on CBC’s The Nature of Things, and a local documentary, “V6A 1Y8” made by Nick Gzowski (1998). The PHS has been evaluated in various studies, citing both the importance of this model of housing and the pressing need for more housing of this type.

The Province newspaper named Liz an “Up and Comer” in 1997, and the Vancouver Sun placed her among the British Columbia’s 25 most “influential” people in 1998. Liz Evans has also been honored by the RNABC as the Health Advocate of the year in 1999. In the year 2000, Liz was named as one of Canada’s Top 40 under 40. Liz also received the Denise LeBlanc Memorial Award by the BC Non Profit Housing Association in 2002, and the Queen’s Golden Jubilee Award for Community Service, also in 2002.

Liz has two small children and lives in the Downtown Eastside.