People First Radio

Rocky Sloan, a student at Nanaimo’s Dover Bay Secondary School, has a plan after receiving a Loran scholarship, worth up to $100,000. “It is my dream to become a doctor,” Sloan said. “Right now, I’m thinking family medicine. Hopefully come back and work here in Nanaimo after I get my MD.” It’s a goal Sloan […]

Keynote speaker and mental health advocate Jessica Ward-King says opening up about her mental health challenges in a public way was a difficult decision. “It was terrifying, but it was also very liberating because then when people ask me, ‘how are you doing?’ I could actually say, ‘not so great,’ and there would be an […]

At age 42, Opal Dar has hit a major milestone as an artist. “Until just a month ago, I haven’t been able to direct anyone to a link with my music,” Dar said.  “I’ve been on stage my whole life singing and doing music, also that whole time was caregiving children and people, and my […]

Addictions medicine specialist Dr. Kelsey Roden spoke with People First Radio at a pop up overdose prevention site near Royal Jubilee Hospital in Victoria. “The toxic drug supply has gotten so toxic with so many additives and contaminants and high potency fentanyl, that sometimes the medications we have available in the hospital are just not […]

Before he was a four time Grey Cup champion, the first player to be the game’s MVP and Most Valuable Canadian at the same time, Andrew Harris was playing in Nanaimo with the Vancouver Island Raiders. Now retired, Harris has shared some of the challenges he faced growing up and during his career in a […]

The relationship between people and plants is at the root of Ethnobotanist Leigh Joseph’s work. “ In my Squamish teachings from that side of my family, it is taught that plants are relatives, that they are relations to us,” she said. “When I was going through my undergrad, which was in botany and biology, there really […]

Evelyn Thompson-George has been hoping someone would write about her father Art Thompson’s experience surviving abuse at the Alberni Indian Residential School. “ I’ve been trying for five years to get somebody to write this book about my dad. I was asking university professors. I was asking people that have written already, and my mom kind […]

Journalists Hal Newman and Chris Curtis have been exploring the intersections between poverty and the criminal justice system in Quebec, interviewing a number of people over the course of several months.. “ What we were finding is that people who get caught up in the system, their lives almost always get immeasurably worse,” Curtis said. In […]

Mental health researcher Yasmine Simone Gray says she identifies as a complex trauma survivor, and resists the label of having a mental illness. “ It’s a very particular push to try to label our distress as a disorder, and it really situates the problem within say my body, as opposed to say within the systems that […]

U.K. Barrister Nick Bano explores the themes covered in his book Against Landlords. Bano specializes in  representing homeless people and residential tenants and migrants in housing struggles. Bano says landlords were on their way to extinction in the U.K. through the start of the 1970s, but deregulation of the private rental sector and a sell […]