August 17, 2026

A Memorial to the Father of BC’s Neighbourhood House Movement, Elmer Helm, 1926-2026

I visited Elmer Helm and his daughters at his North Vancouver home on a sunny afternoon in May 2026, a few months after his 100th birthday. I was there to interview him about his storied century, to celebrate his many accomplishments – including being essentially the father of the Neighbourhood House movement in BC – and to meet the person whom my colleagues had raved was “the nicest man you’ll ever meet.” I’m glad I went when I did as this article will now serve double duty – to acknowledge his remarkable life, and to serve as a memorial. Sadly, Elmer Joseph Helm passed away June 29th, aged 100 ½. 

It’s a challenge to capture the highlights of a life in a few paragraphs. I’ll start with my impression of the man, as his presence had an amazing way of showing you who he was before he even opened his mouth.

There is no other way to put it: Elmer twinkled. His cerulean eyes crinkled at the edges and danced as he talked about his family, his work, his life. He greeted me at the door with a hearty handshake and ushered me into a living room alive with memories. A fully decorated Christmas tree stood in the corner despite it being the first of May. For all the effort involved only to do it all over again, he asked, why bother taking it down? It’s true I liked Elmer as soon as I met him. 

Born January 6, 1926, Elmer grew up in logging camps in Vancouver Island’s Comox Valley and attended the two-room Tsolum High School in Merville, where his graduating class consisted of four boys and four girls. When Sports Days rolled around each year, he noted, the eight teens had to play every sport to compete with the surrounding schools. It instilled an early love of physical fitness and an appreciation for the importance of discipline.

His family later owned a farm near Black Creek. With hunting and fishing close at hand, it was, he said, "unbelievable." Unfortunately, the idyllic setting on the farm would prove too painful after his older brother, 13 at the time, tragically drowned in a lake on the property.  His parents left soon after, relocating to Nanaimo.

Elmer served in the Navy in WWII and returned in 1944 with the intention of pursuing life as a logger. A suggestion from Veterans Affairs changed the direction of his life.

"They said, 'Well, you got your university entrance. Why don't you go to university?'"

He did. He studied physical education, then earned a Master of Social Work in 1952 with a thesis focused on the Alexandra Neighbourhood House. 
 

That path brought him to East Vancouver, working with disadvantaged youth. He described a very different Vancouver from the one that exists today, one with gangs, where violence was much more the norm, he said, with teens regularly carrying bicycle chains and knives. 

One story he shared captured the challenges of that period. A young man he worked with was involved in a fight. "His boot was just like a rifle,” Elmer said. “It was a lethal weapon.”

The altercation had two irreversible outcomes: the victim died and the young man was convicted and ultimately executed, becoming the last person in British Columbia, he said, to receive the death penalty. The case left a lasting impression on Elmer and underscored the challenges facing many of the young people he worked with, who had access to very little in the way of support.
 

Making a difference

At the time, there were “a lot of one-parent families raising kids," he recalled. "They didn't have support services. They didn't have daycare." Young people also had few places to go and there was a dearth of structured programs to support them.

His first stop was the then-Kiwassa Girls' Club where, he said, "they tested me." The Kiwassa program later transitioned into a Neighbourhood House and Elmer played a direct role in that evolution.

The Neighbourhood House movement would come to be a defining legacy of Elmer’s life. 

Neighbourhood Houses had their roots in late-19th century London, where community-based support emerged in response to urban poverty. “Canon [Samuel] Barnett was working in the slums of London, and he got students to come down to work with the people... And then a lot of very important people came down and [did the same],” he said. “That's where it started from, and it spread the whole idea… to Europe, over to New York and Chicago, and it came into Ottawa and Toronto and then over to BC.”

In Vancouver, the model adapted to local conditions with straightforward principles: services should be delivered within communities and shaped by local needs. 

He later became executive director of Gordon Neighbourhood House in Vancouver’s West End, where the need was acute. "We had 55 children in the daycare," he said, "and a lot of them, we had to subsidize. If we had closed out, what would have happened to them?" 

His persistence yielded results. A grant from the province helped establish what would become a broader childcare subsidy, municipal involvement increased, and at one point, the work was deemed important enough that a member of city council was appointed directly to the board.

These were incremental gains, but they compounded.

"That was quite an achievement," he said, referring to the establishment of provincial support.
 

A royal connection

One of the beneficiaries of the Neighbourhood House system and Elmer’s work was a young teenager named Vic Chapman. He ended up being able to return the favour. 

A football player, he went on to play for four teams in the CFL before becoming press secretary to Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau and later served in a similar capacity for the British royal family. 

“When Prince Charles and Lady Di were coming out to Vancouver, we contacted him, and he got Prince Charles to come to Gordon House,” he said. “So my wife and I were in the receiving line for him. Lady Di, she went to the Children's Hospital, but he came to Gordon House. He was quite good with the teenagers."
 

Leading the neighbourhood house movement

In 1967, the neighbourhood house movement formalized at a provincial level and Elmer became the first Executive Director of the Association of Neighbourhood Houses of British Columbia (ANH). He held the position for nearly 20 years, operating eventually out of the Heritage Hall building at 15th and Main in Vancouver’s Mount Pleasant neighbourhood.
 

One of the keys to success, according to Elmer, was that the structure was decentralized and proponents of expansion houses had to self-organize.

"If the community wanted a neighbourhood house," he explained, " they had to form a committee."

Municipalities would often provide land and the association would help raise the funds needed to build and operate facilities. Over time, it contributed to a growing network of neighbourhood houses across the province.

The impact extended into many areas of community life: childcare programs, support for working parents, services for seniors, and youth programming. In some cases, social housing projects developed alongside these organizations. Many of these services are now taken for granted, but they were far less common when neighbourhood houses first began expanding their reach.

And Elmer was relentless in his advocacy for the movement.  

“Maurice Eagan was Director of Social Planning, and he had to make recommendations in terms of our grants and he became quite a good friend,” he said.  “I took him fishing. I was quite a fisherman, fly fisherman, and I took him up to Squamish, and on the side of the river, there was all these big rocks and that, across the snow, and he fell down in there. And so I said, ‘Well, Maurice, I'm not going to pull you out of there unless you can increase our grant.’” 

Beyond shepherding the neighbourhood house movement into being, Elmer also established the Alexandra Foundation in 1977 to help raise additional money to support it. To this day, funds raised in the foundation are used to help support existing and new neighbourhood houses, especially as they navigate the difficult early years. 

One of the notable legacies of Elmer’s work with the Alexandra Foundation was the creation of the Elmer Helm Youth Fund, which provides need-based financial assistance to students who wish to pursue or continue post-secondary training in the artistic, academic, or technical fields. He remarked that since his retirement in 1990, over 200 students have received funding. 
 

An athlete to boot

Outside of his professional work, Elmer’s life was no less full. He was an accomplished athlete, particularly in tennis, for which he and his wife Ollie won a national mixed doubles championship in the 1970s – "because of her, not me," he said with a smile.

Elmer also spent more than a decade helping establish public tennis facilities on Vancouver’s North Shore, culminating in a lifetime recognition from both the City and the District of North Vancouver.

As mentioned, Elmer was an avid fisherman and his eyes twinkled again as he reflected on a story of one of his many fishing exploits with his good friend, Frank Carson, and their two sons. They went out on Frank’s large vessel, but did their fishing on smaller, 10-foot dinghies. 

After Frank pulled in a weighty 44-pounder, Elmer noticed something strange on his line. 

“This other tyee start towing us … I said, ‘Geesh, maybe you’ll have to swim back to the main boat!’ [My fish] was nearly 65 pounds - biggest fish caught up there for five years.” 

He had it mounted and presented his prize to Ollie. “I said to my wife, I said, ‘Isn't that a beauty?’ I said, ‘We can put it up on our bedroom wall.’ She said, ‘It's either me or the fish.’ It went downstairs.”
 

To give, not to receive

When asked what advice he would offer someone looking to contribute to their community, he said, “You have to have the personality to deal with people and give. You don't think about receiving." At the same time, in his experience, "when you give, [you get] back so much…. I was very fortunate in receiving a lot," he said.

Among the accolades in his lifetime, in 2012 Elmer received the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal. His name also adorns “Helm Lodge” at Sasamat Outdoor Centre, a camp on the outskirts of Vancouver that Elmer helped bring to life in 1987 with the help of, among others, Leith Wheeler co-founder Murray Leith, who was President of the ANH Board at the time. 

Elmer impacted many people and organizations across his life, but he and Alexandra House have a unique role in the history of our firm as well.  Alexandra House was Leith Wheeler’s very first foundation client, back in 1982, and remains a client to this day – by definition, our longest tenured. For this reason, and every other one described here, Elmer Helm will be remembered by our team with fondness, a deep appreciation for all he’s done for British Columbia, and a feeling of inspiration that we can be and do more than is expected of us. 

RIP Elmer. You’ll be missed.
 

For more details about his family, life, and memorial service (Sep 2, 2026), click here. 

Click the links for information on how you can support the Alexandra Foundation or the Association of Neighbourhood Houses of BC. 
 

Author

Mike Wallberg

Principal, Head of Marketing & Communications