In my previous post, I mentioned that I would like to see council be more active in community action groups. This idea is not original to me. Current council president, Tom Thomas, suggested the idea a few years ago, but I agree with him whole-heartedly. Mr. Thomas went so far as to suggest that council develop an outreach program which would be chaired by one of the sitting council members as an ad hoc commitee of council. Representatives of the various service groups around town would be invited to join the committee to better coordinate community events and to increase the support pool for each member service group.
As a participant in one such group, I can easily see the value of such a co-op. I am a member of Focus in Toronto. We have worked with the Chamber of Commerce over the past few years in organizing the July Fourth weekend Community Day events and the annual holiday parade, and recently, we took over organizing the annual Arts Festival. I feel that the network involved in co-ordinating our plans with the city could have been much more easily streamlined had Mr. Thomas' plan been in place. Furthermore, we could have also communicated more easily with other groups like the Bridge Builders and the Beautification Committee just in case any of our plans conflicted with theirs.
As your councilman, I would embrace any opportunity to build community and foster inter-organizational co-operation. In fact, I have a proposal in mind wherein council would coordinate fund raisers with the various groups and the money raised would be put to use to provide free wi-fi service all over town. This would make the entire city a hot-spot so that citizens and businesses could go online using any laptop computer no matter where in the city they happened to be. Other communities have done this successfully, and it can be a very effective selling-point when attempting to lure both new business as well as an incentive to attract new residents.
Monday, March 2, 2009
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