providing low-barrier wellness services to
trans and gender diverse people

Join the CWHWC Board

The deadline for expressing interest has been extended to December 15, 2018.

Are you passionate about ensuring that all trans and gender-diverse folks get access to respectful, affirming and holistic health care? Do you want to join trans and gender diverse community members in providing low barrier holistic health care that is by and for our community? Consider volunteering with the board of the Catherine White Holman Wellness Centre (CWHWC)!

CWHWC is a volunteer-run, community-led low-barrier wellness centre for trans and gender-diverse people in Vancouver, ancestral and unceded Coast Salish Territories. We’re looking for people to join the CWHWC’s board. In this opportunity, community members will work together with existing volunteers to help the organization grow and thrive. Becoming part of the CWHWC is an opportunity to work in collaboration with other folks who share a commitment to supporting the well-being of trans and gender-diverse people and to creating the affirming, caring spaces the community needs.

We are excited to meet and collaborate with new potential board members. This is a chance for people to bring their skills and to gain more experience working with a community-led non profit. We are also excited to meet new faces and continue to strengthen our community and learn from one another. (See below for updates on our centre’s work!)

While we are looking for board members who may be able to dedicate as much as 12-15 hours per month, we are also striving to prioritize flexible hours for our volunteers. Volunteering includes attending monthly board meetings (in person or by phone), leading board-related projects (e.g., fundraising, governance, policy development) and communicating and collaborating with other volunteers by email.

We offer child-care and travel subsidy for clinic gatherings. We use spaces that are physically accessible and minimize scents and chemicals. We strive to make sure that we find ways to make volunteering possible and accessible for our members.

In connection with ongoing decolonizing* and antiracist work being done at CWHWC, it’s our priority to centre the experiences and skills of Black, Indigenous and People of Colour (BIPoC) and trans and gender-diverse people. With this in mind, we’re prioritizing recruitment of board members who are BIPoC and/or part of trans and gender-diverse communities, though we’re open to hearing from prospective board members of all identities and backgrounds.

We’re looking for potential board members with a broad array of skills and experience, including:

  • Experience in decolonizing*, anti-racist and anti-oppression work, including experience with supporting community organizations in that work
  • Lived and/or community/professional knowledge about the health and wellness of trans, two-spirit and gender diverse communities
  • Experience building solidarity and relationships with members of BIPoC communities, at individual and organizational levels
  • Experience in and/or supporting transfeminine communities
  • Experience with community-driven service provision
  • Experience in governance of health and/or social support service organization(s)
  • Experience in policy development and board governance
  • Experience in sustaining long-term, volunteer-driven organizations
  • Experience in/knowledge of organizational design and change management
  • Experience with designing and facilitating community consultations
  • Partnership development and partnership management experience
  • Strategic planning experience
  • Fundraising experience
  • Budgeting and financial management experience
  • Experience with human resources support and management
  • Legal expertise
  • Communication skills
  • Organizational skills

If you’re interested in learning more about this opportunity, please send an email to cwhwcboard@gmail.com telling us a little about yourself, what makes you excited to join our board, what experience in life and work you will bring to the clinic and if you have any questions for us. We also welcome you to tell us about your accessibility needs if you want to share this information with us.

More about joining the CWHWC board now

It’s an exciting time to get involved with the CWHWC board! The centre is in a period of evolution. Joining the CWHWC board now is an opportunity to support an organization that has been an incredible resource to transgender and gender diverse communities for 7 years to figure out how to best meet the needs of community in the coming years while supporting the folks who help make the organization happen.

CWHWC is in the midst of some big shifts.

We are in the process of implementing a plan developed by our BIPoC members that seeks to centre an Indigenous and decolonizing*, anti-racist, anti-oppression framework within CWHWC. This includes exploring the kinds of support and care that our communities need, including specifically health and wellness practices from traditions that are non-Western and non-Eurocentric.

We are also actively seeking funding to support our work (we are entirely volunteer-run at the moment) and entering into a conversation with our CWHWC community about how to make this shift in a way that is best for the folks we support and who work with us.

The above shifts mean that there is a lot of space for change/evolution in the organization: from organizational structure to community relationships to funding models, etc.

If you’re interested in learning more about this opportunity, please send an email to cwhwcboard@gmail.com by December 15, 2018 telling us a little about yourself, what makes you excited to join our board, what experience in life and work you will bring to the clinic and any questions you have for us. We also welcome you to tell us about your accessibility needs if you want to share this information with us.

* A note on the term “decolonizing”: We recognize that this is not everyone’s preferred terminology, and we as an organization look to do the necessary outreach and dialogue on this language as part of our larger ongoing work to centre Indigenous leadership and voices.