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Lost Ones
SEEDS OF
SHELTER
Lynn Hannley,
December 10, 1946 – April 26, 2025
by KATHERINE ABBASS
NO COMMUNITY IS built overnight.
The seeds of mutual support and trust
take time to root, and they need care,
patience and vision to flourish. Fortun-
ately, Lynn Hannley was a gifted gardener.
She understood how to cultivate commu-
nity through cooperation and compassion
— a vision she nurtured over decades,
helping others find safe, sustainable
housing and a sense of home.
Lynn Hannley began her career in the
late 1960s as a recreational organizer,
where she saw firsthand how the city’s
most vulnerable populations were being
failed by a lack of accessible, affordable
housing. By the 1970s and ’80s, what had
once been community-centred theory
began to take root as practice — a shift
she welcomed and helped lead. Hannley’s
involvement grew through the Native
Brotherhood Society Centre and the
Edmonton Social Planning Council,
where she joined the team that established
WIN House, Edmonton’s first emergency
women’s shelter, in 1970.
That happened to be the same year
that Simon and Garfunkel released Bridge
Over Troubled Water, one of Hannley’s
favourite albums. The tender lyrics of its
titular track reflected the kind of care she
hoped to provide women at the shelter.
She developed a ritual of popping the
album into the cassette player at the start
of every volunteer training session, and
the women would sit together and listen
as softness settled over the room.
In the decades to come, Hannley herself would bridge
several groups working to improve the city’s housing
landscape. She founded two organizations in the early
’70s — the Communitas Group and the Edmonton
Coalition on Housing and Homelessness — and vol-
unteered with many more. Opportunities to push new
projects forward came few and far between, so Hann-
ley often forged them herself. Once, in 1971, after being
denied a meeting with Canada’s health minister during
a visit to Edmonton, Hannley coaxed the politician into
accepting a ride to the airport. Now trapped on the
icy QE2 for 30 minutes, he had to listen to Hannley’s
proposal for a community services centre providing
social supports for Edmonton’s most disadvantaged
citizens. Captivated and persuaded, the minister’s
department would soon fund a three-year pilot project
that created the Boyle Street Community Services.
Hannley’s dream for housing co-operatives was a
mixed-income community where neighbours co-habit,
learn and grow through everyday interactions with one
another; she lived this dream herself at the Sundance
Housing Co-operative in Riverdale. Each spring, Hannley
set to work planting marigolds in the soil lining the
walkway outside her home. She planted lilies too, which
drew the eye of one neighbour in particular. Soon after
paying Hannley a compliment on them, that neighbour
received a bucket filled with lilies of her own to plant.
The seeds of Hannley’s legacy have grown to inform
new projects and policies nationwide. Those who
worked alongside her will continue sowing, heartened
by recollections of Hannley’s quiet tenacity, gentle smile
and vision of a future with that created space for all of
us to grow. ED.
Lost Ones is a new series honouring local legends and unsung heroes
who’ve recently passed. To recommend someone whose story deserves
memorializing, email [email protected].
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