08/17/2026
"CACV and VOAF have built a stage, quite literally, for artists whom the rest of the industry too often overlooks." - Kagan Goh, Multidisciplinary Mad Artist and Mental Health Advocate and Activist
Dear friends of CACV,
For 10 years, the Vancouver Outsider Arts Festival (VOAF) has worked to create an inclusive space where hundreds of outsider visual and performing artists have been celebrated.
With your help, we can continue to sustain and strengthen this invaluable program.
Donation link in bio.
Thank you to Kagan Goh for sharing his experience with VOAF:
"This year, I have the honour of standing on the stage at the Roundhouse Community Centre as a featured performing artist at the Vancouver Outsider Arts Festival, presenting my one-act monologue, Professional M.D. It is a piece born from three decades of living, writing, and performing my way through bipolar disorder — a work that turns the language of diagnosis inside out and hands the microphone back to the person behind the chart. When I say the words out loud, in front of strangers who become witnesses, something happens that no clinical setting has ever managed to do for me: I stop being a case, and I become, simply, an artist telling the truth.
That transformation does not happen by accident. It happens because CACV and VOAF have built a stage, quite literally, for artists whom the rest of the industry too often overlooks: artists with disabilities, neurodivergent artists, LGBTQ2S+ artists, BIPOC artists, and others working from the margins of what mainstream arts institutions still consider 'professional.' VOAF does not treat us as a diversity checkbox or a token panel discussion. It treats us as artists, full stop, and gives our work the same care, promotion, and audience that any other festival would offer. That distinction matters enormously. It is the difference between being spoken about and being heard.
I ask you to support VOAF and CACV not out of charity, but out of recognition: these organizations are giving voice to the voiceless, and in doing so, they are making Vancouver’s arts community more honest, more whole, and more alive. I hope you will help keep that stage standing."
