Board of Directors

Tim Louis is a practicing lawyer who has been actively involved in Vancouver civic politics for more than forty years. He has lived and worked in Vancouver throughout his adult life and has long been committed to advancing accessibility, public service, and community advocacy.

During his time as a law student at UBC, Tim co-founded Vancouver’s custom transit service for people with disabilities, HandyDART. From those early years through to his terms as an elected official on both Park Board and City Council, he has listened to and advocated on behalf of communities across Vancouver.

Tim’s twelve years as an elected official in Vancouver gave him extensive first-hand experience in serving constituents and addressing public concerns. He was first elected to the Vancouver Park Board in 1990 and re-elected in 1993. During his six years as a Park Board Commissioner, he helped bring an end to special perks for commissioners and successfully pushed to have those funds reallocated to children’s programmes.

Tim also listened carefully to residents concerned about whales in captivity and brought those concerns forward to the Board. He was successful in convincing the Board to adopt a new policy restricting the Vancouver Public Aquarium’s ability to import additional whales.

In 1999, Tim was elected to Vancouver City Council alongside Dr. Fred Bass. In 2002, he was re-elected as part of a COPE majority. During that term, Tim was a leading force behind the City’s Ethical Purchasing Policy and the establishment of a Food Policy Council. He also served as Chair of the City’s Finance Committee, where he stood up for residential property owners and helped prevent taxes from being shifted off business property owners onto residential property owners.

To learn more about Tim’s life and career, visit Tim Louis’s biography page.

Penny Parry moved to Vancouver in the early 1980s after spending her early childhood in the suburbs of Montreal, Quebec, and her teenage and undergraduate years in Burlington, Ontario. She later returned to Montreal, where she earned a PhD in clinical psychology from McGill University.

Over the past forty-plus years, Penny has worked alongside children, youth, and families in many different roles. Her work has included serving as the Child and Youth Advocate for the City of Vancouver, where she helped expand the position’s focus to include youth as well as children.

She has also worked at a residential centre for troubled youth, served as a tenured associate professor in the School of Child and Youth Care at the University of Victoria, and provided staff training for social service and youth care workers across a range of organizations.

Penny has long been active on community boards, including RayCam Community Centre and the Provincial Youth in Care Network. Throughout her professional and volunteer work, she has consistently approached planning and problem-solving from the perspective that the voice of the child, youth, adult, or community directly affected must not only be heard, but treated as essential. In her view, those voices are intrinsic to both the planning process and the solutions that follow.

Alongside her formal and volunteer work, Penny has also always kept a place for art in her life, continuing to explore creative expression in parallel with her community-based commitments.