News and Features
Continuing Jim Green's Legacy
By Hadani Ditmars published Oct 5, 2012
How Alexandra Rutherford quietly takes up the torch and starts making an impact— just like her larger-than-life dad
Alexandra Rutherford is walking in her father’s footsteps. Heir apparent to Jim Green’s network of social enterprise and community nonprofits, she’s following his career in a metaphoric sense, but today it’s physically true as well. It’s Father’s Day weekend, and Rutherford is rambling along the Downtown Eastside streets he knew and loved so deeply.
We start at the Harvest café on Union, a few hundred metres from the Georgia Viaduct and only three shiny new shops from Solheim Place, the housing co-op Green founded in the wake of the post-Expo eviction death of logger Olaf Solheim. Green himself toured me through this new “Viaduct” district at the end of last year, a few months before his death by cancer in February. With former city co-planning director Larry Beasley—his unlikely copilot in the winning proposal to radically reshape the gridlocked area—at the wheel, Green was visibly frail but still passionate. His vision, augmented by architects Norman Hotson and Margot Long, was architecture as metaphor: bring down the barriers, introduce pedestrian greenspace, and unite Vancouver’s historic districts with each other and the waterfront.
Rutherford, 38, looks nothing like her father, who adopted her when he married her mother, Belgian-born bookkeeper Jacqueline Henry. But she shares his commitment to the area where she spent much of her early childhood. She comes by her activist spirit naturally: her parents successfully lobbied to open Vancouver’s first francophone elementary school, École Anne Hebert, for her.
“One of my first memories of Jim,” Rutherford says as we pass the old family home at East Georgia and Princess, “was this tall, skinny guy with big hair who made pasta from scratch. I was quite impressed.”
Experiences from childhood—going to peace marches and protests with her parents, getting to stay up late listening to Motown while her dad chatted with longshoreman—have left their mark. Rutherford had a lower profile than others in the Green clan (which includes her sister Geneva Biggers, daughter of Nancy Green; his four stepchildren from his 20-year marriage to Roberta McCann; as well as many grandchildren), but when she returned to Vancouver from studying and working abroad she was Green’s choice as successor.
