About us
The Vancouver Island Public Interest Research Group (VIPIRG) is a non-profit organization dedicated to research, education, advocacy, and other action in the public interest. Located in the Student Union Building of the University of Victoria, VIPIRG is a place where students and community members connect to work together on social justice and environmental issues. VIPIRG has been operating since 1983, when UVic students voted to join BC PIRG.
VIPIRG’s achievements include:
- disrupting mainstream discourses of poverty and homelessness, via media campaigns by the Radical Health Alliance
- publication of Out of Sight: Policing Poverty in Victoria, a report on the social costs of policing poverty
- successfully lobbying UVic to create a recycling program on campus
- research that was the basis for the establishment of a community dental clinic
- putting cruise ships on the map as a local environmental issue
- organizing the campaign that kicked NATO out of town
- getting students course credit for doing research for community groups
- establishing a native plant garden and supporting a community garden at UVic
- Completing a sustainability assessment of UVic with the University of Victoria Sustainability Project
What we do
The Vancouver Island Public Interest Research Group (VIPIRG) is a non-profit organization dedicated to research, education, advocacy, and action in the public interest. Located in the Student Union Building of the University of Victoria, VIPIRG is a place where students and community members connect to work together on social justice and environmental issues.
Students and community members oversee VIPIRG through a volunteer coordinating collective. VIPIRG staff and volunteers organize events, do action-oriented community-based research, sustain action over time through ongoing working groups, and publish educational materials.
Students and community members can borrow book, films, journals and zines from our resource resource library. VIPIRG publications can also be found online here.
For more information about VIPIRG contact us.