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In January 2009 we had our Ignite Tour. The visit ACE Ambassador, Ian Hill went very well. The Town Council, school children, local groups and citizens were all “choppin’ at the bit” to build our community through the ACE program. We held a town meeting to discuss where the citizens would like to focus their attention and handy work. After much discussion three areas came to the forefront. We had a large group interested in upgrading/new pool, others wanted a series of community events that would bring the community together and the last major idea was a way to communicate to the community at large the events that were taking place within our area.
Consensus was that we would begin by putting our efforts behind a pool. Our pool is 33 years old and we knew that the life left in the pool would be short. We had talked to the Town and they were on board with this. We were set to move forward when it was decided by the County of Vulcan and The Town of Vulcan that a deeper investigation into the pool was needed. The Town talked with the County regarding the funds to make some kind of improvements at the pool. This was not to be an easy or speedy process. We were told that we needed to stop moving forward and go sideways for a bit. There needed to be an independent study on the feasibility of new pool vs an overhauled pool. That took the wind out of sails. We know that with the County wanting a study done before they would talk dollars was an understandable way to move forward.
This was a blow to the ACE program in our community because everyone was focused on the pool and it was a tangible way to support our community. So now, a lot of the people who were involved with the pool and ACE were faced with choosing a new project. We had a meeting which turned out to be a small handful of the people. The small group helped to organize the second objective which was to bring about a way to gather the community together in a meaningful way. This led us to our 2nd objective.
We have already begun working on our 2nd objective and that is to bring the community together in community building experiences. We have created a “Vulcan Concert Series” which is held in the fall and winter months of the year. Were we are bringing local and Canadian performers to town to help Vulcan gain exposure to our culture and heritage of performing arts in a family setting. This has been a huge success in not only exposure for our community citizens but also by the performing artists who have now got Vulcan on their radar as a great place to perform. Artists have requested that in the near future they would like to come back and perform for our community again. We have now begun our second season of the “Vulcan Concert Series” and look to continuing on with this series for a while yet.
We have also hosted our Vulcan Fall Fair on Oct 8th, 2010. We had only a handful of people at the planning meeting that wanted to see this come about. We set out to figure out what we wanted to happen and then we divided those ideas between the 5 of us to reach out to community members to help make it happen. They came through in a big way. This event brought people from 1 month to 90 years old out to our Rodeo grounds to partake in a corn bust, quilt display, chili cook-off, wagon rides, family dance and many more activities. Through this event we had many people who wanted to be part of ACE activities.
As with all ACE activities, we want to get people interested in helping our with our next activities and as result of our Fall Fair we were approached by a member of the RCMP to work together to put on an event for Dec 31st 2010, a Family Fun Night”. We also have a Community Block Party in the planning stages.
The New Years Eve - Family Fun Night is well on it way to happening we have found out that not many people want to be involved with meetings so what we did with our core group of people is we set a date, time and cost for the gathering.
We also made a rough outline of what we want to see happen music, entertainment etc. Referring back to the people who signed up for ACE we put the call out for help and have been happy to say that people are coming together to make this event happen in ways that work for them. We have the Fire Department putting on a bonfire, someone has committed to looking after the fireworks, groups are going to help out with providing food and beverages, and community members are helping in other areas.
The community calendar is our 3rd objective and it went online in April 2009. Groups let the Vulcan & District Recreation office know when they are holding an event and we would then have it added to the website calendar so that everyone and anyone would have 24 hr access to what is happening in the County.
This has been a positive thing in our community and we are working with VBDS to improve on the community calendar to make it more easily accessed to input information on by the users and to make adjustment to the overall appearance.
We are also working with VBDS to create community calendar screens to have around town to improve on the visibility of the community calendar. The need and improved calendar that we are working on will allow people to add their event and I just administrate the information. The calendar will be an ongoing thing that we will tweak as needed.
Our adventures with ACE have been a bit of a roller coaster but the benefits to our community have been numerous. The people who were at first interested in ACE because our focus was going to be the pool have rallied around our other focus areas.
We have gotten to know our neighbours through our planning and through the process of putting on quality events within our community. Many people have commented that Vulcan is working together to put on events that make Vulcan a better place to live, work and especially play. We continue to work on our ACE activities and will continue to work with the town and county with the pool, like I said we were moving sideways with the pool but hopefully we will be moving forward with this community concern in the near future. We look forward to many years of working as community with our citizen, business and groups to maintaining a healthy community lifestyle through our ongoing ACE programs in Vulcan.
Yours Sincerely,
Bonnie Ellis
Director of Vulcan & District Recreation
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