Major LLCS Charity Programs and Contributions (Updated Summer 2024)
For the past 31 years, the Lotus Light Charity Society (Vancouver) has held numerous programs and initiatives in the hopes of benefiting less fortunate community members in need, especially those impoverished resident in DTES Vancouver community.
- Lotus Light (COVID-19) Community Caring Drive has been organized and partnered up with local food warehouse, food manufacturers, food distribution hubs and assistance groups, distributed a total of 530,000 lbs of food to marginalized and low-income groups since the start of the pandemic, and benefitted tens of thousands of individuals and families including low-income families, seniors, migrant workers, and those affected by the pandemic in lower mainland and Fraser Valley.
- Lotus Light Annual Community Caring Day: Every July in the heart of the downtown eastside Strathcona Chinatown neighbourhood, Lotus Light Community Caring Day brings together individuals, businesses, neighbourhood groups, and community service volunteer groups to raise awareness and provide resources and support to the most vulnerable members of our local Downtown Eastside community, and to celebrate community caring. The LLCS Annual Community Caring Day has distributed over 200,000 units of food items, clothes, and daily essential items cumulatively since 2017. The sixth annual event held on July 20, 2024 has benefitted nearly 1,000 vulnerable members in the DTES.
- Lotus Light annual Winter Charity Drive has been helping unhoused and low-income residents survive and find comfort during the harsh, cold winter months. The program has distributed over 650,000 (Valued at $1,500,000) winter garments to the homeless and impoverished residents in the Lower Mainland, with over 30 beneficiary shelters and charity organizations since 1995. In the 2023 Winter Charity Drive, a total of 50,000 winter care items were distributed to people in need. From December 2023 to February 2024, the Lotus Light Extreme Weather Response Team made multiple emergency distributions of care packages, fruit drinks, hot chocolates, hot coffee, sandwiches, hot lunch boxes, snacks, and fruit to the houseless people living on the street during the record-breaking cold temperatures this past winter. The Extreme Weather Response distributions have benefitted over 300 unhoused people in the Downtown Eastside community.
- Lotus Light Free Hot Meal for Homeless was established in 2015 to help vulnerable people with monthly free lunch boxes distribution in Oppenheimer Park in DTES community. The program has been expanded to weekly meals program supported by Lotus Light Emergency Kitchen as a response to the urgent food needs of local vulnerable groups in July 2020. The charity kitchen now prepares 100 meals twice a week to help vulnerable groups in DTES community and has prepared and distributed over 40,000 free and nutritious meals since summer 2020 to help unhoused community members and low-income seniors living in the Downtown Eastside SRO Collaborative social housing buildings.
- Children Assistance Plan (CAP) provides food and household items, including hampers and grocery shopping gift cards, to help inner-city school students from low-income families. Lotus Light established Children Food Backpack Program in 2013 to donate non-perishable food items to support Strathcona Community Centre’s Children Food Backpack Program and other inner-city school’s student assistance program, the program was combined with Student Food Hamper Drive during the pandemic and now expanded to Children Assistance Plan to help more students from low-income family in our inner-city schools. Lotus Light’s Children Programs have donated over $22,000 worth of gift cards and more than 65,000 lbs of food, household cleaning items and personal protection gears to help students from low-income families. More than 1000 students from 10 inner-city schools are benefited.
- Lotus Light launched Food Recovery Program in 2010, started with a weekly bread pickup from a north van bakery, now provides an average of 8,000 lbs of food rescued from food warehouses, restaurants, bakeries and grocery chains every month to help our local communities. The program has rescued over 750,000 pounds of much-needed nutritious food from going into landfills and distributed to vulnerable low-income families to fight food insecurity in our communities.
- Lotus Light Charity Society Scholarship has been providing scholarships to post secondary study for financially disadvantaged students who have achieved distinguished academic excellence and actively contributed to community volunteer works, over 260 students benefitted.
- LLCS (Vancouver) annual Rice Donation Program has contributed over 385,000 pounds of rice to local food banks and other community organizations, with a total of more than 100,000 beneficiary families over 28 years.
- Lotus Light also holds Free Income Tax Clinic and Free ESL Class to help low-income seniors and new immigrants.