FOUNDATION LAUNCHES FOUR PILLARS FUND

A new Four Pillars Fund to support groups fighting addictions in the
Downtown Eastside was kicked off Wednesday when the Vancouver Foundation
put up $250,000 as seed money.

Foundation president Richard Mulcaster said the plan is to create a
permanent endowment fund of $30 million, with the help of former mayor
Philip Owen as chief fund raiser.

The money would be used to help finance innovative strategies aimed at
combatting substance abuse.

"It's going to be a call to action for Vancouver. We'll see how generous
Vancouverites will be," Mulcaster said, as he announced the new fund at the
Carnegie Centre in the heart of the troubled Downtown Eastside.

Both Owen and current Mayor Larry Campbell said they believe there is huge
public support for tackling the city's addictions problem.

Owen, who championed a new "four pillars" strategy that envisioned treating
addiction as much as a health problem as a criminal one, said that it is
grassroots people who want to see new solutions to addiction.

Owen has spent the last four months touring western Canadian cities to
speak to community groups who come out to see the Nettie Wild movie Fix,
which documents Vancouver's political and personal struggles with drug
addiction.

"The public want to get involved in this," he said.

The Vancouver Foundation grants more than $33 million annually to charities
throughout B.C., giving to everything from neighbourhood improvement grants
to medical research.