ABOUT US
Since 1994 the Secret Lantern Society has celebrated art, culture, beauty, community, the cycles of Nature, and light through our annual Winter Solstice Lantern Festival and various community events.
We are an artist-run and community-driven organization, and our mission is: to transform spectators into participants through celebration.
Our lantern festival is entirely based upon the return of the sun and the returning warmth that allows ice to melt, water to flow, animals to emerge from hibernation, and plants to grow. Maintaining this strong connection to the natural world, and the ways in which diverse cultures celebrate this turning point, is essential to our artistic programming.
The universality of solstice inherently connects us to a wide variety of cultural contributors and, in a single solstice night, members of the local Coast Salish and Urban Indigenous groups and the Chinese, Persian, Southeast Asian, Japanese, African, Middle Eastern and European communities have all shared their arts within the festival. This cultural range exists among performers and participants alike; their vitality and imagination are integral to our celebration.
We are committed to the ideals of keeping our arts-based celebrations free, inclusive, culturally diverse, ecologically sustainable, non-denominational, non-commercial and community-focused.
In celebrating Vancouver’s diverse cultural heritage our festival has brought together over 250,000 public participants over its 30-year history and literally hundreds of volunteers, performers, artists and community partners have engaged the public in celebratory activities over the course of these three decades.
In 2021 we were blessed to find a long-term home in East Vancouver. Affectionately known as Secret Headquarters, this magical space enables us to host our own events such as the Secret Salon Series and our annual fundraiser.
We actively support our social-profit programs with custom lantern commissions, lantern workshops, lantern sales, film and special event decor rentals, and rental of our gorgeous Secret Headquarters for parties, meetings and celebrations of life. Let us create something wonderful with you!