Old East Village Block Party

Date: July 16 2011

Time: 2 pm – 7pm

Location: On the Street -- Lorne Avenue --- Between English and Ontario

Facebook Event Page –Search -- Old East Village Block Party

Plans for the OEV Block Party are well underway and a committee of neighbourhood volunteers has been working hard to get this party started! We have received a tremendous amount of support (especially from the residents of Lorne Ave -- thanks again!) but we are always looking for more input. The main purpose of this event is to encourage residents of the neighbourhood to get to know each other and have fun while doing it. As we all know, a friendlier neighbourhood is a safer neighbourhood. There are planned children’s events including: the Library Road Show, Engine 81 (fire engine), face painting, crafts for a variety of ages, bubbles and an obstacle course. There is the possibility of a dunk tank, jumping castle, and free cotton. Neighbourhood arts and culture will be displayed throughout the event, including visual art displays and live musical entertainment from village musicians. We are also planning to have a street hockey tournament running throughout the day and will possibly have a display of classic cars from the neighbourhood. The food arrangements are still in motion, but we expect to do an informal barbeque made up of donated hotdogs, hamburgers, and veggie burgers/dogs.

What we need from you:

1. Volunteer to lead up the food/barbeque section of the Block Party. This job will require the organization of getting barbeques to Lorne Ave on the day of the party and working with myself – Mike Courey – to secure the barbequing items. Some funding is available for this section of the block party. Please email oevblockparty@gmail.com if you are interested.

2. Pop, Juice, and chip donations for the day of the party. We are going to try and secure the barbequed items through local business donation and community funding but if we can gather the drinks and chips to go with the meal from the neighbourhood this would be great. Email oevblockparty@gmail.com to make a donation commitment of what you will bring for the day. If you would rather donate money to help make the barbeque successful we are able to issue donation receipts.

3. Children’s event donations. We need any donations of craft supplies, bubble solution, colouring books, and sidewalk chalk. As well we need day of volunteers to help run children’s activities. If you have any donations or would like to volunteer with the children’s events please email Catherine Tansley at msctansley@yahoo.ca

4. Children’s entertainers and coordinator. We are looking for musicians, story tellers, or any other form of child oriented performances (magic shows, clowns etc.). Right now we have someone organizing all of the music/entertainment (children’s and adults) but we could use a volunteer to focus on making a really good kid’s entertainment stage line-up. If interested email oevblockparty@gmail.com.

5. Musicians – We are looking for neighbourhood musicians who are willing to show off their talents. We are looking for a wide variety in music styles. Let us know if you are interested in performing. Sets will range from 30 to 45 minutes.

6. BOOTHS are available - Neighbourhood visual artists, residential businesses, or artisans of any kind, are welcome to apply to have a booth set up at the block party. The purpose of these booths is to raise awareness of the variety of talents and services present in our community. Email oevblockparty@gmail.com with the details of what you would like to set up.

7. Day-of Volunteers – we need more volunteers to help run the event on the day of the party. Day of volunteering needs range from security to clean-up to supper time barbequers. Day of volunteering does not have to span the entire day. Please email oevblockparty@gmail.com and let us know how long and from what time between 12:30 and 8pm you can volunteer on the day of the event.

8. Hockey team sign up – If you have a street hockey team that you would like to sign up or just want to get on a team yourself please contact us. The street hockey event is contingent upon how many people show interest. To sign up email oevblockparty@gmail.com.

We look forward to working with all of you and hope that we can pull off a great community party on July 16^th. If there are any questions or concerns please contact Mike Courey at 519-851-2677 or oevblockparty@gmail.com

Properties at Risk Tracking Sheet

The tracking sheet has been created to help residents keep track of questionable behaviour to report to the CORE unit of the Police. This was created by the Properties at Risk Sub-Committee.Illegal Transaction List

Traffic Calming Proposal for OEVCA

Traffic Calming Public Proposal

Traffic Calming Public Proposal

Spring 2011 Newsletter

Spring 2011 News

Requesting volunteers to help organize an Old East Village Block Party

Dear neighbours,

We would like to propose an Old East Village Block Party to take place sometime during the summer of 2011. The main purpose of the block party would be to bring neighbourhood members together for a day of family fun and community building. The day would be a celebration of the great people and community that has been built over the past decade in OEV and be a catalyst for the further development of neighbourhood safety and solidarity.

We would like to ask anybody who is interested in planning such an event to contact Mike Courey (mcourey[at]uwo.ca). We will need volunteers to help with: organizing children’s activities, music, food arrangements, activities for adults, an arts and culture show, and whatever other ideas people may have to offer. The vision would be to invite people from our community with special talents to perform and share their gifts with us.

If you are not able to volunteer but would like to offer some ideas about what might be a good activity or event at an OEV block party we encourage you to email your ideas to Mike Courey (mcourey[at]uwo.ca).

We look forward to hearing from you and will set up a time to have an organizing meeting by mid-March. At that time we will divide up the responsibilities and develop a game plan for how to make this happen.

All the best,
Mike Courey
857 Princess Ave
519-851-2677

jan 2011 ">

jan 2011

Walk to Shop in Old East Village

As part of the Strengthening Neighbourhoods Strategy underway in the city, neighbourhoods were invited to apply for funding from the City of London to assist in developing local Walk to Shop initiatives. The Old East Village Community Association, in partnership with the Old East Village Business Improvement Area, is one of three successful applicants. Our grant from the city has been supplemented by two generous cash donations from merchants on the corridor and significant donations-in-kind from the Association and the BIA.

The money is to be used to encourage residents to shop locally and to highlight the options available to us within walking distance. While the focus is thus to help to deliver local folks to local merchants – not to promote local merchants to markets outside of the neighbourhood – it has always been clear to us that the prospects for both residents and merchants are improved when relationships are nurtured between them.

The commercial corridor that runs along Dundas Street has always been a strategic asset of the neighbourhood. The Revitalization Plan currently underway along Dundas Street (currently in its second iteration) has been celebrated nationally for the progress it is making but bringing commercial corridors back to life, especially secondary corridors in the downtowns of larger Canadian and American cities, is complex work that takes years to accomplish. Though Dundas Street East remains in transition, there are many good options available to us – especially in the arts and culture sector, with a number of top notch venues in the performance arts, and in the food sector, with the successful Western Fair Farmer’s Market going a long way towards addressing the status of Old East as a food desert, and a number of very good restaurants and cafes.

The Walk to Shop strategy we are working on has three inter-related parts to it.

First, we will be working with the local business community, including with those residents operating home-based businesses, to develop a local business directory, to be distributed through our community newsletter, the Old East Village News, hand-delivered five times per year to the nearly 2,000 residences in the neighbourhood.

Second, we are going to design a Scavenger Hunt that will take place over the next several months to bring as many local residents into as many local businesses as we can. At the end of the day, the best we can do is to get as many residents as possible into the stores along Dundas Street. After that, it’s up to the merchants themselves to give us a reason to come back.

The largest and most difficult portion of our strategy will involve a local wayfinding system along our neighbourhood streets and along the corridor. Wayfinding, for our purposes, refers to artistic signage that will act as visual cues for residents to the proximity of local shopping options, as measured by walking time. The mapping of neighbourhood walking times from a myriad of points to various categories of shopping options along the corridor will be translated into wayfinding symbols to act not only as markers but as visual cues reinforcing a local shopping ethic in Old East Village. Old East walks, certainly more than most other neighbourhoods in the city. We want to explore the use of symbols in influencing behaviour.

There are benefits to the wayfinding program over and above bringing residents into local businesses, though this is important. The program will establish the neighbourhood as one engaged in reclaiming the corridor for its own use. New businesses are obviously interested in the strength of the local consumer market available to them as they work their way through the business planning process, and a neighbourhood that votes with its feet will make attracting the kinds of new businesses we wish to see that much easier.

We intend to work our way through designing and implementing the strategy in the most collaborative way possible. We hope that local residents and especially local merchants will get involved early.