Photo: Nicholas Johansen

What disappoints you and what do you cherish?

These are the questions several UBC Okanagan students set out to answer Saturday as part of a project to find the similarities between people of different backgrounds.

Three boards were set up downtown by the Sails at 11 a.m., with a question posed on each. The first board asked “Where do you consider home?” while the other two asked about what people cherish and what disappoints people.

Many of the responses were similar.

“With ‘cherish,’ you can see ‘family,’ ‘family,’ ‘my children,’ ‘family,’ ‘friends,’ ‘family,’ ‘my husband,’ it’s all so similar,” said Laurence Watt, a third-year political science student and one of the creators of the project. “Then you go to ‘What disappoints you’ and you’ve got ‘racism,’ ‘hate,’ ‘ignorance,’ ‘judgment,’ ‘selfishness,’ you’ve got a lot of similarities here too. So the point is, yes we do all come from different backgrounds … however it’s the stuff we cherish and the stuff we’re disappointed by that proves we’re a lot more similar than one might think.”

The project was created through several discussions set up by the Political Science Student Association around negative current events in the news.

“We thought, it’s great we’re having these discussions, but how do we push the discussion off campus, how do we actually create change, because you can’t do much outside of the university walls,” Watt said. “We were upset that there was so much in the news about racism and xenophobia and Islamophobia and we really wanted to show that it doesn’t matter if you’re a Muslim, it doesn’t matter if you were born in a different country, the point is, our needs are the same.”

Saturday’s event downtown was the second installment of the Canvas Project, with the first being held on the UBC Okanagan campus.

While Watt said they found more geographical diversity in the campus iteration, the response downtown was great.

“I half thought we’d get some people who’d take it as a joke, maybe even draw a couple penises on it, but it’s honestly been a really terrific response,” Watt said. “We’ve had a lot of people come by and say ‘This is really good, it’s made us think about these questions,’ so for me personally, it couldn’t have been more of a success.”

Watt said they plan to take the canvases back to school and compare the campus project with the downtown project and eventually put them together in a large art piece.

“The best part of this whole project was looking at people stop before they actually write and think about what they’re going to say, so it’s interesting to see people take a step back,” said Ryan Kaila, vice president of finance and operations with the UBCO Student Union Okanagan. “They’re engaging.”