Roy L Hales/ Cortes Current - Walk With Me’ returns to Campbell River on Wednesday November 16, 2022. Participants will sit in a circle, while the organizers descibe the project and explain the explain the context of the stories they are about to hear. Then they will go on a walk, listening to a 40-minute-long audio on a headset. (There are static options for people with mobility issues.) After the walk is over, everyone will return to Spirit Square and reflect upon what they heard.

“We exist in a public health emergency that has taken the lives of 30,000 Canadians and many of whom are my friends. I've dealt with friends dying for the last 10 years to the toxic drug poisoning crisis, and it's conducive society community to do what it is able to do to prevent the loss of life and to prevent suffering needlessly,” explained Christopher Hauschild, a Research Administrative Coordinator with the project.

Project Director Sharon Karsten added, “We’re building relationships across divides, inviting people to think about the gravity of the crisis and about potential solutions in these small cities. I think really key in all of this work are notions of collective health and wellness and how can this be achieved in our small communities? Certainly there's a rise in housing prices, a rise in numbers of people experiencing homelessness in these small places. With those numbers rising comes a rise in community tensions around downtown cores, and around public space. All of these tensions tend to sit under the surface and boil away. They need to be addressed in some way through a dialogue, through civic engagement, through better understanding, through human connection. That's the work of this project is to facilitate those understandings, those connections, those relationships that we hope will lead to transformation.”

This is not the first time they came to Campbell River. There was a walk in the fall of 2021.

Campbell River’s next ‘Walk with Me’ takes place from 10:30am-12pm, and 12:30-2 p.m. on November 16. Anyone wishing to participate is invited ito Spirit Square.