A Vancouver program that tries to ensure vulnerable bar and clubgoers get home safely after a night out is expanding to Victoria.
Good Night Out operates a team in Vancouver’s Granville Street entertainment district on weekends. The street team looks out for people leaving a club or bar, sometimes helping someone find their friends or waiting with them for a taxi, said Stacey Forrester, education director for the non-profit.
The goal is to ensure club and bar patrons don’t fall victim to sexual predators or others seeking to take advantage.
“We swoop in and become their best friend for 15 minutes,” said Forrester, project manager for the street team in Vancouver, as well as new teams coming to Victoria and a city in the Interior that hasn’t been selected yet.
The organization has received federal funding to expand its work to Victoria as a two-year pilot project, although details of what nights and where the team will operate are still being worked out.
The group hopes to launch the Victoria team in the spring.
In Vancouver, a six-person team spends Friday and Saturday nights from about 10 p.m. to 3:30 a.m. in the entertainment district, checking on people. Team members wear peach-coloured hoodies and carry backpacks full of snacks and juice boxes, looking for people who appear visibly upset or intoxicated and people on their own or in a group where they don’t seem comfortable.
The people they support often report feeling unsafe but they’re not sure exactly why, Forrester said.
“A lot of the work we do is just waiting with people, for their ride to come, to be reunited with their friends,” she said.
The team has a dedicated phone number that businesses in Vancouver can call if security staff are worried about someone they’ve just removed from an establishment, said Alex Kierstead, a workshop facilitator with Good Night Out based in Victoria.
The organization was born out of the understanding that sexual aggression is often linked to alcohol consumption, and tries to help people avoid ending up in vulnerable situations, she said.
Carissa Ropponen, resource development and communications manager at the Victoria Sexual Assault Centre, said the street team’s expansion to Victoria will increase the sense of safety for those going out at night.
“We know sexualized violence and sexual assault happens in the nightlife scene and Good Night Out is going to be really important at addressing some of the root causes of that and providing a safer experience for everybody,” Ropponen said.
Good Night Out provided education and outreach at the University of Victoria during the first six weeks of the semester, what’s known as the “red zone,” when sexualized violence is most prevalent, said Cleo Philp, director of campaigns and community relations for the University of Victoria Students’ Society.
Philp plans to bring the organization back in February for a sex-positivity expo.
Philp said she’s particularly concerned about the lack of safe spaces for queer people in the city and is hopeful that Good Night Out’s expansion to Victoria will help address that.
“I think that harm-reduction approaches and informed-bystander intervention services are going to be a really big thing in shifting some of that culture,” she said.
Good Night Out surveyed more than 300 people in 2022 to get perspectives on night life and hospitality spaces in Victoria. The survey found 66.1 per cent of people would feel safer with a street team present outside bars and clubs.
