Bruce Eriksen
Canadian politician (1928-1997)
Bruce Eriksen (March 22, 1928 – March 16, 1997) was a Canadian artist, social activist and founder of Vancouver's Downtown Eastside Residents Association (DERA). Eriksen and DERA are recognised for materially improving the lives of residents in the Downtown Eastside (DTES).
Childhood and youth
Bruce Eriksen was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, a child of an immigrant Danish couple. When he was five years old, he and two brothers were sent away to Knowles School for Boys, an orphanage, after the death of his mother. He ran away from the school at the age of twelve, and rode the freight trains to the West Coast, arriving in the DTES at age 14. By age sixteen he boarded a grain freight ship bound for Shanghai. Upon his return to British Columbia, he logged in the Franklin River and Port Alberni regions. During World War II, Eriksen worked in a shipyard in Vancouver, and became a member of the Seafarers' International Union of Canada. He eventually became an ironworker until a serious back injury forced him to take more sedentary work.
Advocacy
In 1973, Vancouver city planner Peter Davies decided what was needed to address some of the DTES' health and social problems (high rates of tuberculosis and other communicable diseases related to poverty) was a democratic organization.
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This entry incorporates text from “Bruce Eriksen” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.