Hub Cycling’s Bike To Shop event is back this August 13 – 21. Local businesses in neighbourhoods across Metro Vancouver are offering amazing freebies and sweet deals for people biking to their businesses.
Get on your bike and come join the Bike to Shop movement with us! As always, registration is 100% free.
Register here and find the full schedule, including all participating businesses, here.
10% discount for anyone who bikes to Makerlabs.
Awen Haus is a collective of makers focused on beauty, function, quality, creativity, innovation and ingenuity. Come discover their products showcased under one roof at MakerLabs.
One free baked good with a purchase of a coffee, tea, or smoothie. Until sold out.
The Eden Cafe is a social enterprise, dedicated to providing great coffee and food in a welcoming space for people from all walks of life. All proceeds from the Eden Cafe go directly into the Eden DTES program.
Buy a beer to stay and get a free cookie. OR buy beer to go and get 15% off.
Industrial-chic brewpub with a two-level tasting room and lounge, plus one of the best outdoor brewery patios in the city. Munch on eats from the Burdy food truck, including their legendary Chicken Parm sandwich.
ENTERPRISING WOMEN MAKING ART (EWMA)
Complimentary coffee/iced tea. Plus enter to win an original art item from the EWMA Store with each purchase of $20 or more.
EWMA supports emerging women artists and artisans in the Downtown Eastside community – over 30 local artists are featured at their store! When you shop local here, you support their programming that lifts women up in the community. Find greeting cards, specialty ornaments, pottery, beautiful jewelry and more.
Complimentary snacks and a coupon.
Livlite provides zero waste groceries for delivery or pick-up in Strathcona. They carry everything from quality pantry staples, specialty brands, and tons of local produce and essentials. Goods are stored in returnable, reusable, or compostable vessels.
Buy a pizza and get a free beer.
Your home away from home in the East Van brewery district. Enjoy their craft beers and delicious food – including incredible pizza by Mordimi Bite of Italy – in a warm and welcoming environment.
Buy a pint of beer and get an order of our garlic bites for free while quantities last daily.
World class brewery right in the heart of Strathcona. The brewery focuses towards traditional European styles, global IPA styles, fruit beers, radlers and seasonal offerings. Their gourmet pizza is a neighbourhood favourite!
The first 50 visitors who cycle to their Summer Social event will have the opportunity to paint and take home a free laser-cut coaster.
Only on August 13 from 3pm to 8pm.
A maker space in Vancouver that provides the tools, space and skills to make almost anything. Communal areas include a wood shop, metal shop, CNC router table, laser cutters, sewing machines, Design Lab with 3D printer, and electronics area.
Brewery Open House with summer beers.
Only on August 14 from 2pm to 5pm.
Brewing from the historic Settlement Building, this brewery is a place of collaboration, innovation, and fermenting friendships. Enjoy their beers at neighbouring Belgard Kitchen, or pick-up beers to-go from their retail shop.
Summer is here! We are thrilled to see a full lineup of events in Strathcona happening this July and August. We can’t wait to get out into the sun and enjoy our neighborhood.
A few of Strathcona’s annual favourites are making their in-person return after a hiatus and some events are brand new to the neighbourhood. Rest assured, all of the events coming up are a great opportunity to experience local music, vendors and workshops right here in Strathcona. You’ll find something for everyone.
Keep reading for more info on what’s coming up next.
10am – 5:30pm
Strathcona Park
From the producers of the Eastside Culture Crawl Festival comes a new and innovative art-making event, the CREATE! Arts Festival. CREATE! Arts Festival is a new community initiative of the Eastside Arts Society bringing together local artists and the community to explore, learn and create art together through a series of affordable and accessible art workshops and a public-participation art installation. Attendees of all ages will learn how to create art such as block printing, felt making, glass blowing, ceramics and painting from Eastside artists in a safe and comfortable outdoor space this summer. Register in advance for workshops here!
11am – 7pm
Oppenheimer Park
Powell Street Festival is one of the largest and longest-running community arts festivals in Canada, located in Vancouver’s historic Japanese Canadian neighbourhood, Paueru Gai – today known as the Downtown Eastside.
This year’s Festival returns to Oppenheimer Park and the surrounding Paueru-Gai neighborhood, located on the unceded territory of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh people.
There will be a full array of programming over the weekend to celebrate Japanese Canadian arts and culture including: live music, dance, theatre performances on multiple stages, delicious Japanese food booths, martial arts demonstrations, children’s programming, ikebana, community booths, a sumo tournament and an annual lottery.
Powell Street Festival’s return to the park celebrates the resilience of the community and the strong relationships with the current residents of the neighborhood.
Learn more about the festival here.
Citywide
Vancouver Mural Festival returns August 4 to 14 with eleven days of block parties, mural tours, talks and more. This festival is an annual outdoor celebration of public art designed to connect, reflect and celebrate our diverse communities through art and live events.
Be sure to come discover murals old and new in Strathcona. Find all the details of the newest murals landing in our neighbourhood as part of the 2022 festival by downloading the VMF App and learn about mural locations and featured artists.
Or why not take a guided tour! Coming with an all new tour for this year, the Strathcona Mural Tour presented by Herschel Supply and led by DeTours will focus on the old industrial area in the north east of the community, taking in over 20 stunning pieces of artwork across a variety of styles. Find tour times and book your ticket in advance here.
3pm – 8pm
780 E Cordova St
On Saturday, August 13 from 3pm to 8pm all are welcome to come by MakerLabs for a free open house event to celebrate summer! This event is an opportunity to see what MakerLabs has to offer, tour the space, meet makers, and participate in making activities and game stations while enjoying music, food, and drinks.
Schedule of events include Member Show and Tell, tool demos, tours of the facility at 4pm and 6pm, live painting of six mural panels, outdoor games, music, and DIY making activities!
The event is run in collaboration with HUB Cycling’s Bike to Shop event. The first 50 visitors that cycle to the event will have the opportunity to paint and take home a free laser cut coaster.
Register for the MakerLabs Summer Social in advance here.
Citywide
From August 13 – 21, 2022, local businesses in neighbourhoods across Metro Vancouver are offering amazing freebies and sweet deals for people biking to their businesses.
Registration is 100% free. Let’s show our businesses and decision-makers how important cycling is for local businesses and for the community. Register now at bikehub.ca/biketoshop.
And stay tuned for more information on participating businesses in the Strathcona neighbourhood closer to the event date! Businesses interested in taking part can sign-up here.
2pm – 9pm
876 Cordova diversion
Performances from The Zolas, Desirée Dawson, Sleepy Gonzales, The Jins, Jenny Banai, IAMTHELIVING Johnny Payne and dwi.
With a roster featuring some of Vancouver’s most prominent musical acts alongside rising homegrown talent, Light Organ Records is celebrating its 10th anniversary. To commemorate the milestone, the label is excited to announce the inaugural installment of Vancouver’s newest city festival. With two stages, licensed bar, food trucks, art installations, a vendor market and digital graffiti wall there is plenty to experience. ‘Summerlight’ features the best Indie music, alt fashion & progressive art, the only thing missing is you!
Purchase tickets here.
2pm – 9pm
380 Railway St
Back for its 5th year, Compound is a one-day, all-ages street festival that is completely free to attend! Brought to you by Monstercat, an independent Electronic music label with its headquarters in Railtown, proud to celebrate the spirit of art & community with this homegrown Vancouver celebration!
You can expect 2 stages of live music (including the Westwood Recordings stage), art installations, interactive games & activities, merchandise, food, drinks, and much more! To enhance your experience, check out the Premium Pass option which delivers prestige vantage points & facilities at the event.
Free RSVP here!
Last September, after months of engagement and brand strategy development, we launched our new commercial district placebrand for Strathcona. Our brand celebrates all the people and businesses that make Strathcona different and exceptional. Despite the challenges of COVID-19 to bring people together, over this past year we’ve managed to bring our new placebrand to life in the streets and across digital channels. Through storytelling and activations we showcase what our members do to make Strathcona a vibrant and resilient community. Here’s how we’ve been bringing Strathcona to the hearts and minds of people across the Lower Mainland, welcoming everyone to come as they are, whoever they are.
We launched a new website that showcases the distinct character of our commercial district and draws people in to discover something different in Strathcona. A comprehensive member directory features all the businesses in Strathcona across our varied sectors. Members can now easily access our program services and information about what we do on behalf of the district. Since launching the website it’s been visited 19,880 times by 6504 unique users.
We continue to maintain 400 street pole banners across the district. The current wordmap design of place names on our banners leans into the diversity of the district of Strathcona. The refreshed design and colours bring vibrancy and pride of place to our streets.
The inspiration behind our #DoDifferent hashtag are the stories of people and businesses in Strathcona doing things in their own unique and unexpected ways. Working with professional photographers and videographers, we’re capturing more original member portraits, behind the scenes photos, and video footage than ever before. We also amplify the content that our business members and community visitors share. We have featured a total of 72 unique Strathcona businesses across our social media channels in the last year. In that time we’ve seen a 56% growth in followers on our Instagram channel. As part of our focus to increase engaging video content, we’ve published two district promotional videos, three business feature videos, and 20 Instagram Reels. Our video content alone has reached 38,733 cumulative views across our social platforms.
In October 2020 we held our first ever Halloween Hop in partnership with the Strathcona Community Policing Centre, Strathcona Residents Association, and Raycam Centre. Eleven businesses and organizations in and around the 800 Block of East Hastings took part in this family-friendly trick-or-treat event. Local employees dressed up in fabulous Halloween costumes to safely hand out candy outside their businesses, and event-goers of all ages enjoyed some Halloween family fun.
Our November Dine Strathcona campaign brought together 17 businesses in Strathcona’s hospitality community to showcase the neighbourhood’s vibrant culinary scene while raising funds to provide support for vulnerable individuals in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. Participating dining establishments offered a feature dish throughout the two-week event period, with proceeds from each dish ordered donated to the WISH Drop-In Centre. In addition to dining in, Dine Strathcona encouraged people to order take-out and delivery options to accommodate the challenging health order restrictions on restaurants at that time. The campaign was covered by 32 media articles, and earned 9.4 million impressions from traditional media. By working with local food influencers, the social media related posts of the campaign earned 1.21 million impressions. Despite the timing of the health order restrictions, over 640 feature dishes were sold in the two-week time frame, which amounted to approximately $10,000 in cumulative sales.
In December, to support our retail sector, we ran a Gift Big Shop Small campaign to support shopping locally for the holiday season. Customers were encouraged to spend $25 or more at three participating locations in order to win a $25 Visa card to support shopping local. Nine Strathcona businesses took part, and many happy customers enjoyed discovering all of Strathcona’s unique offerings for the holidays.
In February, Strathcona joined 15 other neighbourhoods across Vancouver to run the Love Your City Contest, a call to get out, explore our city, and find LOVE in our neighbourhoods. Event-goers could enter the city-wide contest by finding love related murals and installations in each neighbourhood and posting them to their Instagram profile. Plus, in the week leading up to Valentine’s Day we did a daily prize giveaway on our Instagram channel to local businesses and received over 2000 contest entries!
We have over 25 businesses in our community that assist with all types of motor vehicle needs. Our Automotive sector campaign in April highlighted five participating auto-sector businesses and supported them to run in-store and online contests to help engage existing and new customers. The campaign received 364 cumulative contest entries across the five businesses, featured original photography and quotes from sector employees on our social media, and helped solidify why Strathcona is one of the best areas in Vancouver for auto services.
In an effort to support our restaurant sector when Provincial health restrictions started up again in April and May of 2020, we ran a Takeout Strathcona campaign to encourage people to keep on supporting their favourite Strathcona dining establishments by ordering take-out and delivery. By raffling off gift cards to local restaurants through weekly Instagram contests, we encouraged new customers to discover the amazing dining options we have here. We showcased our favourite takeout items with fun weekly Reels on Instagram that earned over 15,000 impressions across our platforms.
Strathcona is home to some of the most notable contemporary art galleries in Vancouver and across the country. In May and June we ran our inaugural Art Walk Strathcona campaign to celebrate our gallery sector. Strathcona’s galleries came together to bring a diverse selection of contemporary art from Indigenous and Canadian artists to the streets on billboards along East Hastings. Art Walk Strathcona invited people to take a self-guided walk to discover the billboard images, and explore the associated exhibitions taking place throughout May and June in Strathcona’s gallery district. In addition to the billboard campaign, we featured participating galleries on our social media channels, and created a transit ad for Art Walk Strathcona that reached communities across the Lower Mainland. Art Walk Strathcona reached over 20,000 users across digital channels.
The Temporary Expedited Patio Permit program meant it was a patio season in Vancouver like no other. To amplify the patio dining experience and to encourage customers to dine on patios all summer long, Strathcona BIA joined 15 other districts for the promotional PATIO campaign, which included a city-wide contest to crown the best patios in the city. An online patio map featuring all the patios across Vancouver, including those in Strathcona, was distributed widely by several campaign media partners. People were encouraged to follow along @patiovancouver to enter daily contest opportunities. Over on our own Instagram channel we shared a steady stream of patio pics and videos to highlight the excellent patio options in Strathcona this year.
To learn more about the Temporary Expedited Patio Permit program visit our advocacy report.
Strathcona was a community sponsor of HUB Cycling’s Bike to Shop event in August, along with 20 other participating districts across Metro Vancouver. Nine local businesses in our neighbourhood signed up to offer sweet deals and delicious freebies to customers who biked to their shop during the event. To celebrate Bike to Shop in Strathcona we sponsored a Knowledge HUB outside of the Landyachtz Factory store where people could enjoy free basic bike maintenance, complimentary snacks, and giveaways from Strathcona businesses. 2245 people registered for the event, and many of those participants discovered businesses in Strathcona as a result.
Fostering a sustainable and flourishing cultural community is important to us. We continue to provide community sponsorships year over year so that other local organizations serving the economic resilience of the district are supported. For the 2020/2021 fiscal year those included, The Powell Street Festival, Eastside Culture Crawl, Coldest Night of Year, WISH Drop-In Centre, and nəćamat Urban Indigenous Women’s Village of Wellness, a community wellness event for Indigenous women in Strathcona.
It’s one of our favourite events of the year and we’re thrilled to see the Vancouver Mural Festival back for their 2021 event. Celebrating creativity, diversity and bringing our communities together through art, VMF has over 60 new murals in the works throughout Vancouver plus live shows, tours, public talks and more.
Adventure through 11 Vancouver neighbourhoods, including Strathcona, to see the beautiful murals come to life through personal, cultural and historical storytelling. Find daily Mural Tours, Talks and Workshops, and 40+ Live Shows at outdoor, licensed venues!
We’re excited to welcome several new murals to the Strathcona neighbourhood, including four projects sponsored by the Strathcona BIA. These include Benjamin Stone’s new work at Container Brewing, a mural by Sitji Chou at Noble, the addition of the Black Strathcona Resurgence Project led mural by Sasha Mbabazi near Powell St. and Princess St. plus over a dozen tree-planter murals designed and ready to be painted by Zac George. Public art has the power to help strengthen the connections between all who share space here, and we are so proud to be a part of supporting more public murals for all to enjoy.
To learn more about Vancouver Mural Festival’s community projects this year, check out: Blanketing The City IV, Black Strathcona Resurgence Project, and Punjabi Market or for an overview of the entire 2021 festival you can visit vanmuralfest.ca. Be sure to download their app for an up-to-date map of murals throughout the city.
Les Amis Du Fromage (843 E Hastings alley)
Artists: Jerry Whitehead and Take5
The work is titled Remember Us. Both artists hope their work will “start community conversations about the path of reconciliation, and develop meaningful relationships in [their] communities” (as shared on this VMF blog).
Container Brewing
Artist: Benjamin Stone
The piece is titled No Arrival.
Noble (1001 Venables St.)
Artist: Sitji Chou
This piece is called Ripple. The mural faces a senior’s home and was created in the hopes to bring joy to the residents who will see it most. The artist hopes the waves, lilies, and koi mingling inbetween will instill a sense of tranquility and whimsy (as shared in this VMF blog).
Black Strathcona Resurgence Project (603 Powell St.)
Photo of mural in progress.
Artist: Sasha Mbabazi
Hub Cycling’s Bike To Shop event is back this summer kicking off on August 7th – 22nd. Local businesses in 20 neighbourhoods across Metro Vancouver are offering free coffee, snacks, sweet discounts, and more to people who visit their shop by bike.
Get on your bike and come join the Bike to Shop movement with us! As always, registration is 100% free.
Register before July 30 for a chance to win a $50 Compass Card from TransLink so you can explore even more Bike to Shop neighborhoods this summer.
Register here and find the full schedule including all participating businesses here..
VV TAPAS LOUNGE
Free glass of wine or nonalcoholic cocktail with the purchase of food.
HARKEN COFFEE
One free coffee to those who participate and ride to the shop.
CONTAINER BREWING
Free pork crisps, happy hour beer pricing ($2 off full pours), 10% off any take-home orders. Enter a draw to win a $100 gift card.
ENTERPRISING WOMEN MAKING ART (EWMA)
Free coffee/iced tea and/or button. Plus enter to win an original art item from the EWMA Store with each purchase.
LUPPOLO BREWING
15% off pizza with purchase of a beer (DINE IN ONLY), $10 Margherita with purchase of a 4Pack (TO-GO ONLY).
LIQUIDS AND SOLIDS
Free 10 oz Soup with purchase of a sandwich or an entrée salad.
COASTAL EDEN CAFE
One free baked good with a purchase of any drink. Until sold out.
STRATHCONA BEER
Buy a pint of beer and get an order of our garlic bites for free. While quantities last daily.
LANDYACHTZ
Free air & oil, plus high fives and bike advice all week.
Register at bikehub.ca/biketoshop
