When Andrea Thomas Hill organized a group of women to volunteer at the Downtown Eastside Women’s Centre’s annual holiday lunch, it wasn’t with the intention of founding a philanthropic juggernaut.
After all, she’d already done that.
In the early 1990s, the Toronto-based sports marketing executive launched the inaugural Run for the Cure for the Canadian Breast Cancer Foundation in memory of her grandmother, shepherding its expansion across the country as the largest fundraiser for breast cancer in Canada.'
By the end of the decade, she’d met her husband, Aritzia CEO Brian Hill, moved to Vancouver and started a family. The newfound perspective of motherhood spurred her to gather her friends to serve that first Christmas lunch in 2007, and, ultimately, led to the founding of the Cause We Care Foundation, a grassroots organization that supports single women and children on Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside with, as she says, a “hand up, not a handout” philosophy.
The following year, Andrea and her new foundation put together and distributed Christmas hampers using her garage as a staging and packing centre. This eventually led to a parallel “Backpack Drive” of school supplies that now reaches over 400 students in four at-risk schools. Next, the foundation addressed childcare, a huge hurdle for working single mothers, by initiating a series of after-school and summer activity programs. Finally, Andrea decided to tackle the biggest obstacle to poverty: housing affordability.
On April 17 of this year, Cause We Care Foundation celebrated its 10th anniversary by cutting the ribbon at Cause We Care House, a subsidized housing facility on East Hastings Street. The result of a hard-fought capital campaign that raised $1.5 million, the eponymous facility provides stable housing and support services for 21 families headed by single mothers in partnership with the Vancouver Public Library, the YWCA and the City of Vancouver.
True to form, as soon as the doors opened at Cause We Care House, Andrea went in search of her next cause to care about, hinting at “a new and bigger focus,” with a top-secret initiative earmarked to begin next spring. Whatever it is, you can be sure it won’t be her last.
