COMMUNITY PARTNERSHIPS

Community Partnerships occur when we work with organizations to co-create tours and other types of engagement together. Unlike our commissioned offerings for universities, conferences, and other clients, community partnerships are done in the spirit of collaboration. We are always looking for likeminded non-profits, cultural organizations, and community advocates to build activities with.

Vancouver DeTours is proud to partner with the following organizations to share knowledge and foster dialogue and engagement.

Current & Previous Community Partnerships

Vancouver Mural Festival (2019 - ongoing)

Official tour partners since 2019 for Summer and Winter festivals

  • Develop tour programming alongside artists, curators, and organizers

  • Emphasis on Indigenous art work, especially from host Musqueum, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations

  • Use of public art to explore urban processes including cultural visibility, neighbourhood change, and ecological urgency

Heritage Vancouver Society (2021 - ongoing)

Co-creating several tour programs for public and private clients including:

  • ‘Pandemic-era City

  • ‘Gastown: Preservation, transformation, contestation’

  • ‘History and present of tenement housing in Vancouver’

  • ‘Paradigms of heritage in space: from preservation to cultural landscape’

VocalEye

(2022) 

Collaborating on art tours for people with full and partial blindness

  • Underwent sighted guide training

  • Worked alongside a professional ‘describer’ to develop artistic programming that guests could experience without sight

  • Challenged perception that art was not accessible to people who cannot see it

Black Strathcona Resurgence Project (2020) 

Co-developing tour programming for public art project reclaiming visibility and addressing erasure of Vancouver's historic Black community in Strathcona

  • 9 sold out tours co-led by former residents of Hogan’s Alley, Curator Krystal Paraboo, and DeTours’ Alasdair Butcher

  • Mix of curatorial, historical, and oral history to highlight systemic racism endured by residents of Hogan’s Alley and ongoing community efforts for redress