The Stranger Project forges connections in Vancouver

Colin Easton wants to hear your story.

With the Stranger Project 2014, the Vancouver storyteller is meeting a stranger every day this year and learning about their lives.

The inspiration for Easton, a fan of 365-day-long projects, came from a desire to connect.

Over coffee downtown, he recounted the experience of his friend Donovan Mahoney, an Instagrammer and recovering addict who befriends Downtown Eastside residents and takes “the most amazing leap-to-life portraits of these people.”

“When he’s done, he always says to them ‘Next time you see me, make sure you say hello because we’re friends now,’ And that really stuck with me,” Easton said.

At that time, Easton was starting to reassess his own interactions with his community.

“I took six months off work last year and was really looking at my own kind of social network,” Easton said. “I’m a huge social media buff and fan and manipulator," but, he continued, “I recognize that while I was getting connected online, I was disconnecting in my day-to-day life. So I wanted to do a project that examined connection.”

In that vein, Easton decided to spend 2014 meeting the people around him. The rules? Walk down the street, and talk to the first complete stranger you encounter.

“On January 1, I was home, it was a nice day, I was by myself…and I decided to go out and get a stranger to talk to me,” Easton recounted. “I was taking out the garbage on my way out to go for this walk and right outside the back of my building was this man named Patrick and he was homeless. He had the buggy and all that kind of thing and I walked past him and thought, 'Nope, you can’t have those filters’. So I went back and he told me the most amazing story. And I was like, that was pretty easy and profound and it kind of went from there." (Read Patrick’s story.)

While the first few stories Easton posted were quite short, they quickly increased in length, and now typically run between 500 and 1,200 words. Momentum for the project, which he started as a series of posts on his personal Facebook wall, quickly built; the Stranger Project now has its own Facebook page, along with Twitter, Tumblr, and Instagram accounts, and its own website.

Easton admitted he’s been totally blown away at the response to the project. “It’s become more of a community than I had ever anticipated," he said.

While approaching a stranger and striking up a conversation might seem abnormal to some people, Easton said he doesn’t have much difficulty with it. Typically, he only needs to approach one or two people before someone agrees to participate.

(Oddly enough, the rare exception was the first day of spring: “It went to 10…The 11^th person talked to me and I was like, ‘thank you so much!’”)

And how does Easton find these fascinating subjects?

“People say to me that I meet the most interesting people and my stock answer to that is, I don’t have a divining rod that picks out interesting people. People are interesting; we just have to stop and talk to them. Everyone has a story.”

Easton, who works downtown for a technology retailer, noted that Vancouver's downtown core is the hardest place get people to talk to him; however, he’s “met some really great people downtown.”

“The woman that I met [Liz, on March 22], I was totally enchanted with her. It was a really, really lovely tender story,” Easton said.

“Liz said to me when I told her what I wanted to do, ‘I’m sure I don’t have anything very interesting to tell you’, but she had a fascinating story just because when she grew up is very different from how people grow up today….But at the end of the conversation she said, ‘Thank you so very much for taking interest in my story’.” (Read Liz’s story.)

“I think that’s really indicative of where we’re at: not only do people not want to ask you questions but people kind have bubbled themselves in and think that no one’s interested in their story.”

Asked if he had a favourite tale, Easton laughed and said, “Sometimes every day is my favourite story!”

He did point to a few standouts, including Clay from Day 23, who picks up garbage instead of, in his words, “being a grumpy old man berating people in the streets”, and Tom from Day 10, who made a significant donation to Vancouver General Hospital after a stint in the hospital himself.

“It just really reminded me that there are good people out there and that good doesn’t have a package; anybody can be good and people will do things to be good, not to be receiving a fanfare or anything like that," Easton said.

But, of course, there’s that looming question: doesn’t everyone already know that Vancouver’s an unfriendly city?

“I call bullshit on the whole thing!” Easton said with a laugh. “I think that the people who deem Vancouver to be an unfriendly city aren’t doing anything to change it….If you want to make a difference, make a difference—do something.”

“I really don’t think there is anyone we could meet who doesn’t have something we would be interested in and able to have a conversation with them about so that’s what I’m trying to do.”