When Governments Step Back and Communities Step In: What Graz and South Vancouver Tell Us About Crisis, Care, and Structural Inequity

A letter from Filipino BC’s Executive Director Kristina Corpin-Moser

The Graz school shooting shows us what governments can do. The Lapu Lapu Day tragedy shows us what communities have done. Both were mass casualty events, but only one community was left to lead the crisis response on its own.

On June 10, I woke up to devastating news from Graz, Austria: A 21-year-old former student opened fire at a high school in the deadliest gun-related mass-casualty event in Austria since the Second World War. My cousin had sent a message—Pray for Graz. As someone of mixed Filipino and Austrian heritage, the weight of that message hit hard. Graz is where my father is from. It’s a place that’s always been part of my story, woven into family memory and identity. In the hours that followed, we reached out to our loved ones. We were relieved to hear our family was safe. They hadn’t attended school that day. 

Graz may be a city of hundreds of thousands, but it carries the closeness of a small town. Everyone knows someone. The grief is communal. And the response—swift, well-resourced, coordinated—was striking. Special forces were deployed to the high school shortly after the first reports of shots–over 300 police officers responded to help students and staff evacuate the school. The police stated that security was restored in 17 minutes. The Austrian Red Cross deployed 65 ambulances and 158 emergency staff to the scene as well as 40 specially trained psychologists to counsel students and parents. Authorities immediately opened a crisis intervention centre in the Helmut-List-Halle event venue, while relatives and parents of children were sent to the ASKÖ-Halle sports complex.

It was a model of what governments can do in a crisis: act quickly, act broadly, and meet trauma with support.

That same day, my thoughts returned home—to British Columbia. Just six weeks earlier, on April 26, tragedy struck our own community following the Lapu Lapu Day Festival in South Vancouver. It was a different kind of emergency, but the weight of loss, fear, and trauma was no less real.

And yet the response could not have been more different.

Our Filipino community in B.C., through Filipino BC and grassroots organizers, moved quickly and decisively. Filipino BC formed a Joint Emergency Task Force. We opened the Kapwa Centre for Community Resilience, a community-led initiative modelled on natural disaster reception centres. We pulled in Canadian Red Cross and Disaster Psychosocial Support workers, just ahead of their busy wildfire season. In the month that followed, we served over 500 people. Not with generic services, but with culturally grounded support, trauma care, and community-led coordination.

But while we were showing what a responsive, caring system could look like, governments were largely absent.

There was no outright denial that what happened was an emergency. But when it came to resourcing a response—funding trauma supports, deploying coordinated services—the answers became evasive. Because it wasn’t a natural disaster, the event didn’t trigger the mechanisms typically used to justify and fund large-scale relief. So while governments acknowledged the crisis in words, they withheld the kind of material support that would have signaled real responsibility. The result was a limited, fragmented response. And once again, the burden of care fell to the community.

This contrast—between Graz and Vancouver, between institutional presence and institutional insufficiency—raises urgent questions. Who gets a rapid, large-scale response? Whose pain is met with coordinated public care? What does it say when governments can deploy hundreds of personnel for one tragedy, while for another, the response is limited, delayed, or shouldered almost entirely by the community?

It’s tempting to say the difference lies in the nature of the events. But the real divide is structural. It’s about which communities our systems are designed to serve, and which they routinely neglect.

South Vancouver, one of the most culturally diverse areas in the city, has also been one of the most systematically underfunded. The Reframing South Vancouver Report from South Vancouver Neighbourhood House lays it out plainly. But anyone paying attention knows you don’t need a report to see how South Vancouver has been treated: as an afterthought by city planners and government funders, primed to be under-resourced and left vulnerable to the social disaster that’s followed the attack.

None of this is new. We’ve been running community-funded social programs for years—filling in where public institutions don’t. But when the tragic events that occurred after the Lapu Lapu Day Festival happened, that neglect became a crisis. 

And while governments praised our resilience, they let us carry the weight alone.

It has been just over 4 months since the tragic events following the Lapu Lapu Day Festival. We are still waiting—for something more than well-meaning words and symbolic gestures. Praise came quickly. Presence did not. And the absence of meaningful action is not neutral—it shapes the aftermath. It reinforces a painful truth: that some communities are left to grieve and rebuild on their own

Moments like this require more than reactivity. They call for institutions to step forward early—unprompted, without waiting to be asked. Because care delayed is care denied. When systems wait for communities to reach out, they shift the weight of crisis back onto those already carrying it.

This urgency was underscored in the Joint Review of Outdoor Special Event Planning and Safety – Final Report from the City of Vancouver and Vancouver Police Department, which called for a Provincial-level Incident Response framework.

True support means arriving before the call comes. It means meeting people where they are—without demanding that their pain first be translated into proposals.

That’s not generosity. That’s the minimum. And our community has had to build what should have been offered. We deserve more than recognition. We deserve a response.

Here’s the deeper problem: Our community’s strength has become a loophole for government inaction. Because we responded so effectively, governments feel less pressure to show up. Our care becomes their excuse.

We’re lauded for stepping up. But we’re also dismissed—as volunteers, as “festival organizers,” as stopgap solutions. Our work is called impressive, not essential. Our cultural programs are funded—but only as “culture,” never as social infrastructure. That distinction is more than semantics; it’s a colonial logic that tries to separate care from culture, as if we could live whole lives in halves.

So yes, we’re proud of how we responded. But the fact that we had to respond largely alone is the real failure.

And yet, within that failure, something powerful emerged. The Kapwa Centre for Community Resilience wasn’t just a band-aid. It was a glimpse of what an equitable response system could look like: rooted in the community, informed by culture, guided by care.

This is what we need to build toward.

Not just as a critique of what’s broken, but as a vision for what’s possible. Crisis response shouldn’t depend on proximity to political power or how a disaster is categorized in legislation or policy documents. It should reflect lived realities. And it should be resourced accordingly.

That’s the invitation here—not to fix the emergency response, but to rethink it altogether. To design systems that don’t just respond to crises but prevent them by building resilience into our public infrastructure. To stop relying on racialized communities to do the job of our institutions. To recognize that culture is care, and care is a right.

We don’t need more praise for our resilience. We need governments that are willing to match our urgency, our insight, and our humanity—with policy, with funding, and with real structural change. The path forward lies in combining institutional capacity with community care—so no one has to face disaster alone.