Living Together 2025 in Action
Video interviews from our May symposium
In early May, we gathered the people and organizations who inspire us, challenge us, and align with our vision, all into one room. The Living Together 2025: Connecting housing, social health and resilience symposium was the culmination of months of planning, and the interest was so strong that, after our first round of invitations, we weren’t able to open it to a wider audience. With that in mind, we set out to capture the essence of the symposium, including the energy, the conversations, the key insights, and the many laughs, for those who couldn’t be there in person (and for those who want to revisit the experience!).
About Living Together: Connecting housing, social health and resilience
Living Together 2025 was a two-day ‘collective action’ symposium that convened nearly 200 housing experts, public health professionals, municipal planners, architects, place-based community organizations, emergency management professionals, senior government policymakers, academics, and students.
Through plenary presentations, breakout sessions, small-group discussions, panels, and more, this symposium identified opportunities for creating a future where more of Canada’s multi-unit housing communities are age-friendly, socially connected, neighbourly, health-promoting and resilient.
Learn more about the symposium, and take a look at the full recap post, including presentation slides and supplemental resources here.
Guiding questions
Across the two days of learning and collaboration, Living Together 2025 centred around two guiding questions:
- “So What” → So what is the context?
- “Now What” → Now what can we do about it?
To reflect this journey, we created two videos featuring soundbites from plenaries, solo interviews, and more:
- The Polycrisis explores the “So What,” grounding us in the context of what’s happening, who’s in the room, and the conditions we’re working within.
- Multisolving explores the “Now What,” identifying opportunities for collective action and levers for policy and systems change.
You can watch each video or dive into the full version below.
The Polycrisis
Multisolving
Full video
We are also deeply grateful to the many Living Together 2025 attendees who took the time to share their reflections in brief interviews. From student research assistants to housing operators, policymakers, and public health practitioners, these voices capture the rich diversity present at the symposium.
Take a look below to hear what some of our incredible attendees had to say.
Interview videos
Dan Levitt
BC Seniors Advocate
“I think anything we can do to engage society around housing is really important. Because housing is health, and health is housing.”
Anthony Kuperschmidt
Strategic Lead, Aging and Older Persons, City of Vancouver
“I think we need to be working across, I think we need to be working with partners. I think we need to be advocating to levels of government. I think we need to be raising awareness about the value and importance of building these connections right where people live.”
Sherri Crane
Manager of Housing Services & Engagement, Brightside Homes
“I think the big takeaway is that this is a topic that is growing in interest. I think the fact that we had such a diverse group of people in this symposium compared to four years ago, let’s say, when I started in this work is something that is really heartening. I think it’s exciting.”
Charito Gailling
Project Manager, Healthy Built Environments, BCCDC
“Social connectedness is health. There’s so much evidence and research being done around how important being socially connected is to being healthy, to having health outcomes that are positive as a protective factor for climate events, for emergencies.”
Ana Mendez and Ame-Lia Tamburrini
Building Resilient Neighbourhoods
“I’m motivated. I feel inspired by what’s going on here, and I have a mix of both excitement and also a little bit of ‘there’s a lot of work to do’. But knowing that we’re in it together makes a huge difference in terms of mustering up the energy to keep going.”
Olivia Tomlinson
Research Assistant, Hey Neighbour Collective
“A big takeaway for me has been the need to engage with people that aren’t thinking about housing and that aren’t thinking about neighbouring – but people who are just trying to live their lives and who don’t necessarily disagree with what we’re talking about, but people who just don’t even know about it or don’t even think about it.”
Michelle Cooper-Iversen
Chief Operating Officer, Co-op Housing Federation of BC
“My biggest takeaway was the fact that we were able to get so many different people that are related to health and housing in the same space, and there’s so many different perspectives that are from data, to government, to non-profit, to co-op housing, to market rental. I think I haven’t seen that anywhere before.”
Katia Tynan
Manager of Resilience and Disaster Risk Reduction, the City of Vancouver
“One big takeaway for me is that social connections are critical to having communities survive, adapt and thrive in the case of all kinds of challenges and changes.”
Ksenia Stepkina
Founder, Good Neighbour Kitsilano
“I think the biggest takeaway for me, personally, has been seeing how many other people and sectors and organizations are inspired by the same issue and have the same vision for a better world.”
Scott Stewart and Rebeca Robles
New Chelsea Society
“Here I found a great surprise: that there’s a lot of opportunities and people with a lot of different skills that are addressing the same topic; we are finding common ground, and working to find solutions for creating healthy communities.”
Jia Hu
Medical Lead, Prevention and Health Promotion, Population and Public Health, BCCDC
“I mean, I think that we’re relatively new in this sort of housing and health space. We recognize that housing is a critically important determinant of health. But I think the most important thing or the most valuable thing coming to this has been just to meet so many different people in the ecosystem of the housing sector.”
We are grateful to Debrief Communications and to all of the incredible speakers and interviewees who, through these many videos, helped distill the highlights, next steps, and central themes of the symposium so perfectly.
