This August 1st marks a full year since the Kapwa Storytelling Series began – a 24-part journey made possible by United Way BC. Over these 12 months, this newsmagazine has woven together voices of a diaspora moving through grief, resilience, and hope in the wake of the Lapu-Lapu Street Festival attack on April 26, 2025.
Our journey began with the What We Heard Report, shining a light on the deep-rooted need for a Filipino Community and Cultural Center—a place to uplift seniors, safeguard children, and realize our shared dreams.
Our 24th story – the finale - Cultivating Joy After Loss: Pathways to Renewal, reminded us that healing from psychological trauma follows no calendar. For Vancouver’s diaspora to truly mend after 2025, a physical sanctuary with a dedicated Wellness Wing has become an urgent call—a humanitarian necessity.
Yet as we draw closer to making this sanctuary a reality, a new challenge emerges—the unwritten 25th story. Rival claims over sites in Mount Pleasant and South Vancouver have left our leaders at an impasse. Right now, this dispute threatens to fracture the Canadian Filipino diaspora and drain our collective energy.
Let us be clear: without swift unity, the chance to secure funding will slip away. If organizational gridlock causes public and philanthropic support to fade, our community will be left without the resources it desperately needs. Such a loss will cast a shadow on today’s community leadership.
To break this impasse, our community must invoke the timeless wisdom of the playwright and social reformist George Bernard Shaw, who famously declared nearly a century and a quarter ago:
"Life is no brief candle to me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got hold of for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations."
We carry the civic torch for only a brief moment. Our sacred duty is to make it shine as brilliantly as possible before passing it to those who come after us.
The choice of a building site is just a matter of zoning; our real sanctuary is found in our shared identity – kapwa – and in practicing pakikipagkapwa, which calls us to equality, dignity, and mutual care.
Canadian Filipino Net urges our community leaders to rise above zero-sum compromise. We call for immediate, genuine collaboration rooted in the spirit of pakikipagkapwa.
Compromise carries a heavy psychological cost. Both sides enter a negotiation with their ideal positions, and both are forced to slice away pieces of what they care about until arriving at an agreement – fundamentally a subtractive process, a negative dynamic. It leaves everyone feeling slightly defeated, resentful, and as though they have surrendered a value. It ends in a win-lose or lose-lose situation.
Collaboration, by contrast, is an additive and creative process. People do not just slice up the existing options; they work together to invent a new option that neither side could have created alone – a positive dynamic. It focuses on shared goals rather than entrenched positions. Instead of asking, “What are you willing to give up?” collaboration asks, “What can we build together that solves both of our problems?” It preserves core values while seeking innovative methods – a win-win for both sides, a collective progress on aligned shared goals.
We must judge these sites by how well they serve our long-term vision. Let us measure each site by how it can best align with the World Health Organization’s definition of health: “complete physical, mental, and social well-being” in one setting.
The capital funding at stake is not the property of any one board, organization, or personal legacy. It belongs to the seniors aging in solitude and to the children who survived the 2025 tragedy.
To help chart the collaborative course, Canadian Filipino Net stands ready to host an Emergency Collaborative Summit, guided by an independent, professional mediator.
Let us write the 25th Story of our active resilience together—a story not of a historic opportunity lost to division, but of a community that rose above factionalism through pakikipagkapwa to build a lasting monument to renewal and “complete physical, mental, and social well-being,” a Filipino Community and Cultural Center with a Cultural and a Wellness wing.
Editor's note: Dr. Rey D. Pagtakhan, P.C., O.M., LL.D., Sc.D., M.D. M.Sc. is a retired lung specialist, professor of child health, and former MP, Parliamentary Secretary to the Prime Minister, and cabinet minister. He graduated from the University of the Philippines, did postgraduate training and studies at the Children’s Hospitals of Washington University in St. Louis and the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, and spent a sabbatical year as Visiting Professor at the University of Arizona Medical Center. He is the author of articles and chapters in medical journals and textbooks and columnist for community newsmagazines. Widely lectured in Canada and abroad, he spoke in June 2003 on “The Global Threat of New Infectious Diseases” at the G-8 Science Ministers/Advisors Carnegie Group Meeting in Berlin. He volunteers on the Advisory Council of Immigration Partnership Winnipeg and the Board of St. Paul’s College Foundation at the University of Manitoba.
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