AN EXPERT IN THE FIELD
MMC’s Cheryl-lee Madden is a graduate student at the University of British Columbia (UBC) Okanagan in the Master of Arts in Interdisciplinary Studies – Urban and Regional Studies program. She is a cluster analyst working in regression models, using statistical data as a cartographer. She conducts a full life-cycle analysis and monitors performance and quality control plans to identify improvements and map out spatial relationships, proposing trends and company initiatives. Cheryl-lee Madden is particularly interested in how people and places, along with environment and society, interact by creating a new map of a sustainable Vancouver, in which all people are able to afford to live in the city.
Cheryl-lee Madden
(she/her/hers)
A Passion for Social Justice
Cheryl-lee’s passion regarding inequality, inequity, and social justice is derived from her personal experience as a sweat equity renter resisting renovictions during periods of gentrification. This has provided her with a powerful eyewitness view of social movements in Vancouver, as her sweat equity staved off five renoviction attempts. Renters have formed a social reproduction network of sweat equity, bringing together painters, small project workers, plumbers, electricians, and decorators that revitalize circa 1960s apartments and halt renovictions. Cheryl-lee’s research has also contributed to understanding Vancouver’s affordability crisis, as attempts are made to determine whether unaffordability has reached such a level that only a painful real estate crash can provide any kind of solution.
A Wealth of Experience
Cheryl-lee has extensive research experience, has made a number of significant conference presentations, and has been a member of the Canadian Association of Geographers (CAG), the Canadian Cartographic Association (CCA), and the American Association of Geographers (AAG) since 2017.
As a researcher, Cheryl-lee Madden creates and publishes a wide variety of material on such topics as social reproduction, capacity building, sweat equity, creative resilience, gentrification, housing affordability, and Vancouver’s rent gap. Learn more about her articles, blog posts, and opinion pieces on our Publications page.
Additionally
A very wise professor of urban planning once told me to: “Keep up the fight. It’s not the final victory that matters. It’s the struggle.” As I stay positively engaging with those whose voice(s) must be heard in actionable ways, these words resonate with me.
Your big data visualization will materialize by hiring my Statistics Canada expertise coupled with the Data Analysis capability I gained from the UBC Statistics department. How to express it!
- Passionate Advocating for people – invisible renters, marginalized Black groups
- Advocate for responsible community building!
- Educator – Biodiversity, sustainability
- Speaker – UBC undergrad capacity
- I am engaged, current, relevant!
- HIRE me for speaking, presentations!!! Order a report, buy a book.
Cheryl-lee is an active neighbourhood renter
Cheryl-lee is a active neighbourhood renter of 20 years in Kitsilano, Vancouver. She lives a one-block walk from Kitsilano Beach, where she swims in open water during warm weather. Cheryl-lee knows the value of preventing root shock—how tearing up neighbourhoods causes generational harm. She works to preserve affordable older purpose-built rental units through sweat equity social reproduction networks. She enjoys taking her pet tortoise Henry for walks in Kits Yacht Club park with her Pudelpoint friends, who babysit Henry while she swims. A typical afternoon at Kitsilano Beach ends with watching a beautiful sunset sink behind the Vancouver Island horizon.
Volunteer Work
- 3 years as educator with the UBC Beaty Biodiversity Museum (BBM); passionate about saving the Southern Resident Killer Whales (SRKW)
- 2 years as Hogan’s Alley Society (HAS) Nora Hendrix Place (NHP) garden blog writer (see Report to City Hall)
Membership and Professional Service
- 2017–2023 Canadian Association of Geographers (CAG)
- 2017–2023 Canadian Cartographic Association (CCA)
- 2017–2023 American Association of Geographers (AAG)