The City of Vancouver has launched a number of initiatives aimed toward creating a better future for everyone in Vancouver. Most likely it is the presence of City Hall in Mount Pleasant that has Mount Pleasant as the Vancouver guinea pig with these collaborative steps with the Mount Pleasant community.
The City of Vancouver Mount Pleasant Community Planning Group has established the
Mount Pleasant Community Liaison Group which meets regularly to share information about the various working groups and the progress being made, as well as issues and concerns of the local community.
Other Working Groups include the
Mount Pleasant Heritage Working Group, and the Social Coordinating Group. The Heritage Working Group is in active discussion with the City of Vancouver over what constitutes Heritage, and the Mount Pleasant community is the framework from which tangible conversation stems. Rather than focusing solely upon physical structures and architecture, the conversations expand to include history of culture, the evolution and heritage of the working class neighbourhood, and the gathering places both current and of old, to name a few.
Angelo Ko from the
City of Vancouver's Mount Pleasant Community Planning Program informs us that Local Historian and Author, Bruce Macdonald is leading a
Walking Tour of Mount Pleasant organized by
Proximity Arts on Sunday, February 10 and Saturday, February 16 at 2 p.m. For details of the tour and registration, please visit
www.proximityarts.com. If you have any questions, please send email to info(at)proximityarts.com.
The
Social Coordinating Group is focusing their efforts on Social Action to address the issues of homelessness, drug addiction, the four pillars program, harm reduction, and involving community members and organizations in creating, developing, and implementing successful strategies.
While no system is perfect, and this effort may seem fraught with errors or seem in vain at times, it is the slow wheels of change that drive progress and always have. Our voices matter now more than ever as we reach forward to an uncertain future, in particular according to many experts, including Vancouver's own Dr. David Suzuki. These warning signals are the catalyst for the City of Vancouver's launch of
EcoDensity: A strategy of significant proportion that a municipality can implement to reduce the municipal ecological footprint.
More can be found in the
discussion forums related to these various topics, and a variety of links to various participating sources. Lend your voice here online, or at the meetings. It's time we got involved.
