Hansen, Tamara

Tamara Hansen

From 2006 to 2010, Tamara Hansen served as an elected Executive Committee Member of the Canadian Network on Cuba (CNC), an umbrella group of 25 Cuba solidarity organizations in Canada. From 2008 to 2010 she was also Co-chair of the network, the Coordinator of the Ernesto Che Guevara Volunteer Work Brigade and the first Co-editor of "North of Havana", the newsletter of the CNC.  

Today, Tamara is the Coordinator of Vancouver Communities in Solidarity with Cuba, and the author of a book and many research articles about the island. She has traveled to Cuba 13 times since 2005. Seven of those trips have been with the annual Che Guevara Volunteer Work Brigade, a group of volunteers from across Canada who travel to Cuba to work on various projects from painting schools damaged by hurricanes to creating urban organic gardens. Tamara’s slide show from her trips will be peppered with stories about volunteering alongside Cubans and her observations about this unique and beautiful people and their island.

Tamara Hansen was born in Burnaby, British Columbia and studied at Simon Fraser University. When not volunteering, Tamara is a secondary school Teacher in West Vancouver.

 

Tamara Hansen spoke to us in April 2014.

 

 

 

Midsummer Festival

Each June we have a booth at the Midsummer Festival on the grounds of the Scandinavian Community Centre. In addition to handing out information about our club, we also sign up new members. Everyone is invited to come out to enjoy this fun annual event. If you have time available, why not consider volunteering to help with our booth?

Christmas Party

 

In December, instead of our usual monthly dinner meeting, we have our annual Christmas party. Our guests are welcomed into the hall by the cheerful sounds of the Runeberg Choir. We have a fabulous Scandinavian Christmas dinner, followed by dancing to live music.

Monthly Dinners

Our dinner schedule for 2024 will be: Feb 14th, Apr 10th, TBD. Social hour starts at 6:00pm, dinner at 7:00pm and the dinner speaker starts at about 8:00pm. The dinner is Scandinavian and usually starts with herring and salmon open-faced sandwich appetizers and ends with coffee/tea and delicious Scandinavian desserts. The theme for the after dinner talk is usually business related and hopefully with a Scandinavian connection but we also schedule other speakers of interest. Two meetings of the year we have no speaker. Instead, in February we have our Annual General meeting where we discuss business for the upcoming year and elect our new board of directors. In June, we have our annual joke-telling contest and discover who, among us, is the best teller of jokes.