Inside a Vancouver storage facility, fluorescent lights flicker above a hallway lined with grey metal doors that roll up to reveal lockers packed with broken dreams — and the possibilities of a better future.
A white stuffed teddy bear, an electric keyboard, a pink suitcase crammed with clothes, paintings, birth certificates and journals, boxes of binders and schoolbooks, mattresses and bed frames, kitchen supplies, Christmas decorations, and Halloween costumes — all belong to women and children who have fled gender-based violence. These items are stored by a unique Canadian charity, Shelter Movers, which relocates people escaping violence for free.
The reality, experts say, is that most victims either stay with their abuser because they lack the ability or money to leave, or they flee with little more than what they are wearing. Shelter Movers aims to change that.
A Lifeline for Victims
“We break the cycle of violence when we’re out on a move. And you can see a person’s life change … just by literally driving and moving boxes,” said Jessie Kaur Lehail, chapter director of Shelter Movers Vancouver. “This is a lifeline.”
Shelter Movers’ Vancouver chapter has 150 volunteers who, since 2018, have handled nearly 1,700 moves, helping 800 women, 1,300 children, and 200 pets in 19 municipalities across the Lower Mainland and Fraser Valley.
Personal Stories of Hope
Chetna Panwar, 23, is one of those women. The charity moved her belongings last August from a residence where she was “traumatized and depressed” to a storage facility while she sought temporary refuge at a transition house. Volunteers later moved her belongings again, this time to a new home in Surrey where she now lives violence-free.
“I (was) not able to move by myself because I was really not in a condition to do anything,” she said. “I was feeling really helpless. I had no help and also I didn’t own a vehicle. And I was not doing good physically.”
Panwar is deeply appreciative of the volunteers’ compassionate, life-saving intervention: “They even assembled the bed for me.”
High Demand and Growing Need
People interviewed for this story, who all work with victims of violence, believe Shelter Movers is the only charity in Canada to offer free moving services for victims of abuse. And demand, tragically, is high.
“We don’t have enough staff and volunteers to cover the full magnitude of what’s actually out there,” said Lehail.
At least 135 people died as a result of intimate partner violence in B.C. between 2016 and 2024, and most of those deaths were preventable, a B.C. coroner’s report released last month concluded. Vancouver-area women enduring gender-based violence are referred to Shelter Movers through about 200 organizations, which include police, Crown prosecutors, health authorities, and community agencies such as the YWCA or Surrey’s Harmony House.
