Each week at Global BC we highlight our stories to bring a bright spot to your Friday and into the weekend.
Here are the five stories we wanted to share:
Community hops into action after bunnies found living on Esquimalt construction site
A community is hopping into action to locate and rescue a family of rabbits found living on an Esquimalt, B.C. construction site last month.
The mother and her five kits were spotted under the planter boxes of an Aragon Properties condo development on Lampson Street, prompting the community and company to work together.
One bunny rescued by the construction team — fittingly named Aragon — has now been fostered. The crew has been working with residents to find the others, as they have some exploration and demolition work coming up that could endanger them.
“The excavator guy had one sitting on his lap. All the guys rallied around the bunnies,” Aragon’s Jay Smith told Global News. “We want to make sure they’re safe.”
Hundreds of volunteer students giving back to Downtown Eastside community
A non-profit organization made up of hundreds of high school students has been supporting people in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.
It started very small, as a few years ago a handful of students tried to make a difference.
“Initially when we started we just had around five volunteers, who would distributed 50 to 100 sandwiches,” said Nick Zhang, Project Hastings’ cofounder.
The non-profit Project Hastings now has more than 250 student volunteers, the majority of them still in high school. Since 2020, they’ve raised more than $20,000 and handed out close to 25,000 meals.
‘It isn’t just a shirt’: $1M raised for Terry Fox Foundation through Ryan Reynolds-designed shirts
Shirts designed with Vancouver’s Ryan Reynolds have raised more than $1 million for cancer research and the Terry Fox Foundation.
The annual shirt campaign, dubbed Dear Terry, has been promoted with the help of Reynolds, who said Terry Fox was a role model of his as early as the second grade.
“The shirt I helped design for Terry Fox Foundation isn’t just a shirt,” Reynolds said on Twitter.
“It’s helping countless cancer patients and raising incredible amounts of money. I’ve been inspired by the courage of Terry Fox since the second grade. He was the ultimate Canadian superhero.”
The money was raised through a pre-sale event, and shirts have been sent in the mail as of Wednesday.
After years-long wait, B.C. marks opening of new seismically safer Vancouver school
After a years-long wait, students at Bayview Community Elementary have a seismically safer school to call home.
The new Vancouver school, which can accommodate 365 students, opened its doors earlier this month, with the province marking its completion formally on Thursday.
“I know a lot of care and consideration went into the design of the school to ensure it will foster a welcoming and inclusive learning environments for students and staff,” said Education Minister Rachna Singh at a ceremony hosted in the gymnasium.
“There’s much more to be done and we’ll continue working towards that.”
B.C. paleobotanist rediscovers Burnaby plant fossils stored at SFU, writes paper
A B.C. paleobotanist has rediscovered a treasure trove of plant fossils, long stored at Simon Fraser University, and analyzed them to uncover new information about the region’s ancient climate.
Rolf Mathewes was an undergraduate student at SFU when his supervisor at the time found plant fossils from a deposit exposed during the school’s construction on Burnaby Mountain in the late 1960s.
When Mathewes returned to teach at SFU as a professor of paleoecology and palynology, he pulled them out of the cabinets to learn more about what Burnaby Mountain flora looked like 40 million years ago, in the midst of a global cooling trend.