1930 – 2019
One of the original founders of Community Alternatives Society along with her husband Tom Bulman, Jan was born in Fernie, B.C. on February 24, 1930.
Building community, and engaging in social action were always paramount to Jan, as was her constant mission to bring a woman’s perspective to the Christian experience. She was active in the United Church throughout her life and served as staff to the BC Conference for social justice in the 1970s, as well as being co-chair of the BC and United Church’s 2-year Conference on the Family.
Jan brought this core commitment to social justice as a social worker and in her many working and volunteer roles – as staff for TRACY of BC, support staff for Vancouver Coastal residential care, participant in rallies and walks for peace, old growth forests, aboriginal rights, women’s rights and healthcare. This carried through life in CAS where she was a founder and business manager for Muffin Works, a founder of Isadora’s Restaurant on Granville Island (both CAS initiatives), and as a committee member of the Land Trust of BC.
Jan was always upbeat, a positive force with a can-do attitude. She inspired the sense that anything was possible. She was always someone to be reckoned with, though you would not know that upon first meeting her. Jan loved social events and and co-op celebrations where she gladly led the singing and played piano or guitar. This satisfied her desire to build community by having people participate and enjoy being together. Outside of the co-op she managed to find time to join a choir, and played with a bell ringing group.
With this abiding interest and passion for community events and celebrations, Jan became the unofficial archivist and often taped events on a hi-8 mm camera. Because of her passionate belief in the vision of sharing lives in this urban “village”, she wanted to communicate to the more mainstream world what this way of living was all about. She wrote an essay for a book on intentional communities, (Shared Visions Shared Lives) called “Love Puddlers and Social Activists”.