Bessie Lee

Bessie Lee (née Lum; August 26, 1924 – December 22, 2016) was a Chinese Canadian community organizer and civic activist in Vancouver's Strathcona and Chinatown neighbourhoods. She was a co-founder and long-time President of the Strathcona Property Owners and Tenants Association (SPOTA), which was instrumental in mobilizing several neighborhoods to work together to stop a freeway in the late 1960s that would have run through the heart of many of Vancouver's inner-city neighborhoods. Lee was also a founding member of the Britannia Community Centre and a board member of the Strathcona Community Centre. She won the BC Community Achievement Award in 2014.

Early life and education Lee grew up in Vancouver's Chinatown in the 1930s. She attended Lord Strathcona Elementary School and Vancouver Normal School. Her family operated a fish and general store that served the Chinese bachelors living in Chinatown. From her mother, an herbalist, Lee learned how to prepare herbal tonics and medicinal preparations made from roots, leaves, bark and wild animal parts that the older men would bring in from the bush. Because her father died young, Lee quit school before graduation to help her widowed mother run the business. When she was 20 years of age, Bessie eloped with Henry James Lee. They had eight children.

Strathcona Property Owners and Tenants Association (SPOTA) In 1968, out of necessity, Bessie Lee embarked on a lengthy career as a community organizer and civic activist. With her home threatened by expropriation and the bulldozer under Phase 3 of the City of Vancouver's Urban Renewal Project and with nowhere else to go, Lee decided to get involved. She was a co-founder of the SPOTA with fellow Vancouver civic activist Mary Lee Chan in November/December 1968. SPOTA was a strong unified community voice against the freeway that was planned to through Strathcona as part of an "urban renewal" program. At the beginning of SPOTA, Lee initially served as the English Secretary eventually becoming its long-time President. Lee and SPOTA helped to halt the program as it would have destroyed the older neighborhoods of Vancouver.

In 1968, Robert Andras, the federal minister in charge of housing for Pierre Trudeau's new Liberal government met with SPOTA. Andras' visit resulted in the halting of the City of Vancouver's existing redevelopment plan and an investment of $5 million in a pilot project. Itt engaged SPOTA in a planning process that involved each level of government and saw existing buildings, streets, and sidewalks in Strathcona rehabilitated and new parks and a community centre built.

Awards Lee won the BC Community Achievement Award in 2014.