Filipino BC’s Statement: 30 Days Since the Tragedy of April 26, 2025

It has been 30 days since the tragic event that occurred on April 26, 2025, following the Lapu Lapu Day Festival.

We continue to hold space for everyone impacted: the victims and their families, witnesses, and all who are still navigating the emotional aftermath. Healing does not follow a straight line. It takes time, care, and community. And for many, this past month has been a heavy one.

In the immediate response, organizations like the Canadian Red Cross and Disaster Psychosocial Services (DPS) stepped in, which are teams usually deployed in the wake of floods or fires. But what happened here is not a natural disaster. It is a social disaster, one that exposes deeper harms and systemic gaps. The impacts are not only physical or visible; they ripple through communities, relationships, and the sense of safety that every person deserves.

When there is a fire or a flood, there is something tangible to point to: burned homes, flooded streets, or evacuation orders. But when the crisis is emotional, communal, and psychological, it’s harder to name. There are no official evacuees of trauma. No clear perimeter of impact. You cannot see a fire burning inside someone.

And because of that, we haven’t even begun to see the full ripple effect of what happened that day. For many, the trauma lives quietly beneath the surface, showing up as disrupted sleep, a persistent sense of fear, withdrawal from community, or a numbness that’s hard to explain. Some may not even realize just how much they’ve been affected until much later.

What’s even more heartbreaking is the hesitation we’re seeing across the community when it comes to reaching out for help. Some who were affected don’t want to ask for support because they believe others need it more. Witnesses defer to those in the hospital. Those in the hospital defer to the families of those who died. This unspoken hierarchy of grief is dangerous, and it’s not how healing works.

There is help for everyone. And more is coming.

Thanks to community-led efforts, a number of nonprofits and charity organizations have now received grants for mental health support through the KAPWA STRONG Fund, created by Filipino BC in partnership with United Way BC. We are also seeing a growing number of professionals in the social work and counselling fields stepping forward because they see it too. There is a crisis simmering just below the surface, and without collective care, it risks erupting.

To those who are grieving quietly, hurting silently, or unsure if what you’re feeling "counts": it does. You do. Your pain matters. You are not taking resources away from anyone else by seeking help. You are opening space for healing, and that is a gift to our entire community.

We’ve also been asked, “How is your team doing?” The honest answer is: we’re doing our best. As we’ve previously put it, it feels like “building a plane as we’re flying it.” Filipino BC is largely volunteer-run. And while we’ve been doing individual case work for weeks, we’re also in the process of growing our capacity. We’re prioritizing the development of a care team, which includes the hiring of case managers, in addition to working closely with a Canadian Red Cross case manager, to identify and support the individual needs of impacted families and community members in the short and long term. Today, most of our team will spend the whole day in Psychological First Aid (PFA) Training led by the Provincial Health Services Authority (PHSA), because for many people walking into the Kapwa Centre for Community Resilience, we are the first familiar faces they see before meeting with social workers or counsellors. 

About a week into the crisis, during a Joint Task Force meeting we convened for a coordinated response, someone pointed out something we had been quietly feeling: Filipino BC is not just responding to this crisis, we are living it too. Many of us are holding grief in one hand and responsibilities in the other. Like so many in the community, we are learning, adjusting, and moving forward moment by moment. This has been overwhelming, but also deeply clarifying. We know what we’re fighting for, and we know we’re not alone.

As we mark 30 days since this tragedy, we commit to continue showing up: for our community, for each other and for ourselves. With tenderness. With honesty. We are moving slowly, but we are moving together.