John Thiessen

Image Credit: FACEBOOK/John Thiessen

A new group of volunteers wanting to help the unhoused has emerged in Kelowna to spread kindness and spread the legacy of a man known to drop everything to help them.

When winter hit early and hard in 2020, John Thiessen was one of the first to make his way to the growing homeless camp on Recreation Avenue to see what he could do. He just wanted to help and wasn't part of any official group. 

But now there's another unaffiliated group of helpers but they do have a name — John's Angels.

It was created by Sylvia Matthews and Bryn McNair who met while volunteering at the homeless encampment on the Kelowna Rail Trail.

While Sylvia had never met Thiessen, she met a group of volunteers who were all connected by Thiessen and wanted to honour his legacy of kindness and continue the work he started.

“John was just a really selfless guy who wanted to help the homeless, his volunteering marked the lives of a lot of people around him and for sure saved many lives, especially in the winter when things get rough,” McNair said. “John would often post when he was going out and some of us would meet up with him. I would send him Facebook messages and we'd arrange to go out with our other friends that way. It was really John collecting the most and then he'd just find people to go with him.”

Similarly to John Thiessen, Nick Matthews was an advocate for the unhoused in his own community outside of the Okanagan. Sylvia Matthews, his mother and a Kelowna resident, got involved with the local homeless community in the wake of his passing.

“When my son died, I had no idea how many lives he had touched through his acts of kindness, and doing this (volunteering) was a way for me to be closer to him and honour his legacy,” Matthews said.

As for McNair, she got involved with Thiessen when most homeless people were living on Recreation Avenue, near the Kelowna Curling Club, and she has been an active volunteer for the past 30 years.

“Homeless people are human and they need the same things we all do, and if we can go out there and give them some basic necessities, give them a smile and let them know there’s someone out there that cares for them, why wouldn’t we do that,” McNair says.

When these two worlds collided upon their meeting on the Rail Trail it seemed evident that all these volunteers that have continued Thiessen and Matthew’s work needed to get organized.

John’s Angels first started as a Messenger group chat full of volunteers trying to help the unhoused community, and as more people joined wanting to give a helping hand, Matthews created a Facebook group to get more organized and named it “John’s Angels.”

“I came up with the name as a tribute to John Thiessen who was a well-known advocate. After my son passed I was drawn to honor Nick's legacy of kindness and John’s group was my outlet for community service,”  Sylvia says. “We just realized that given the change with John gone, we needed some way to organize volunteers without becoming a registered organization.”

The group was created on Feb. 5, 2023, allowing more people to join and spread the kindness. Whenever they plan on going out to give food or clothes, they announce it to the group and whoever is interested in joining can do so.

The group is not a registered charity or organization, rather it is simply an organized group of volunteers. This means they do not have the same resources other organizations do, but with recent growth, John’s Angels is hoping to make a greater impact.

“We went from a few dozen members, to now close to 100 so we really want to figure out what is the best thing for us to do as a group to really help those who need it and who want to get out of their situation, because a lot of them, as obvious as it may seem, do not want to be homeless and living on the Rail Trail,” Matthews says. “Gratefully we are starting to bring awareness and developing a more recognized reputation as homeless advocates.”

Through donations, they have provided the unhoused community with clothes, food, blankets, warmers and more, and as the group grows, they hope to continue doing so especially with winter being the hardest time of the year for the unhoused.

Anyone wishing to join John’s Angels can do so through Facebook by visiting the John’s Angels group.

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