October 2025 Newsletter

Pumpkin Alley – November 1^st, 2025 at 6:00 PM

You’re Invited to the 2^nd Annual Convent Glen Pumpkin Alley!

The Convent Glen Orléans Wood Community Association is thrilled to host pumpkin alley again on Friday November 1^st, 2025 from 6 – 8 PM. Join us in Voyageur Park (south end) and bring your carved pumpkins with battery powered tea lights (no candles) to light the path for a wonderful post Halloween tradition.

Our mission includes fostering community connections through the creation of local events that allow members to engage with one another. 

 Bring your family, friends, and neighbors to enjoy …

• Free coffee and hot chocolate 
• Kids games and glow in the dark fun
• Bring your carved pumpkins to light the path
• Prizes will be awarded for pumpkin carving
• We will collect and donate pumpkins to local farms

We will need volunteers to help with kids games, organizing the contest and prizes.  Reach out to me, Arnold, or [email protected].

Let’s come together to celebrate our vibrant community. We can’t wait to see you there!

Extend Your Cycling Season Workshop – October 16, 2025 at 12:00 PM

Envirocentre

Delivered by a friendly, experienced cyclist, this virtual workshop will teach you what you need to know to feel comfortable biking year-round. You will learn tips, tricks, and tools to extend your cycling season into the fall, or beyond! We will review route planning, techniques, and simple suggestions for winter bike maintenance. The goal of this workshop is to help riders discover opportunities to cycle year-round. (English/French).

Upcoming Volunteer Opportunities

Outreach Committee

On a regular basis since the middle of the summer, the Outreach Committee has been sending out emails to our registered members who asked to be contacted with volunteer opportunities. Register if you’re able to help plan or run events, we’ve love to have you.

Kidical Mass Orléans – September 27, 2025

The morning of September 27 on a quiet stretch of Jeanne d’Arc in Convent Glen North, bike riders of all ages and abilities took to the street in a fun and joyous call for safer streets for our children, families, and neighbours. This Kidical Mass is a call to our city to make sure our transportation network in Orléans can be safely used by everyone regardless of their choice of vehicle. Read the article about potential changes along our route that could make this happen now.

Thanks so much to all the volunteers and everyone who came out to spend a beautiful fall morning with us on bikes advocating to make it easier for our kids and everyone in the community to travel through it safely.

Thanks to city councillors Laura Dudas and Jeff Leiper for coming out, to Savvy Party, Dave the Bike Guy, and Bushtukah for bringing support and supplies, and to all our volunteers who came and helped out! This wouldn’t have been possible without a collaborative effort from our organizing partners Bike Ottawa, Kidical Mass Ottawa, The New Orleans, and other organizations like For Our Kids and School Streets Ottawa. Thank you all!

Repair Café – September 27, 2025

❤️🌎 What an amazing community we have! Today we had 12 “fixers” volunteer their time and expertise to fix broken items for our community members. They educated attendees on maintenance and repair of a variety of items. 🌎❤️

🚲 Of the 77 items brought to our repair cafe, 58 items were successfully repaired. There were zippers and other clothing fixed. Lamps, vacuums, sewing machine and toys fixed. A variety of tools and knives were sharpened and multiple bikes were repaired. 🧵

❤️ Please join us in extending a heartfelt thank you to all of the community volunteers and fixers who made this event possible. Thank you to Orleans United Church for the use of the space and thank you to the Ottawa Wildflower Seed Library for giving away seeds to participants! ❤️

Community BBQ – September 7, 2025

The 2025 edition of the Community BBQ was a rousing success! Golden Fries fed over 350 participants, and we had participation from a dozen plus booths and organizations who helped make the event a huge success. Thanks to everyone who helped out and those of you who came to participate.

Winners of the prizes provided by Dominion City Brewing and Almanac Bakery have been chosen and will be contacted shortly to arrange picking up their prizes. We plan to continue to use our membership list as a way to easily and fairly do prize drawings, so be sure to get registered if you aren’t already!

Hidden Harvest, a hidden gem!

Chantal Boudreau

Over the Summer, I became a Neighbourhood Leader with Hidden Harvest (more on them below!). I’d participated in harvests with them before and enjoyed how accessible they were. There’s no experience required, all specialized equipment is provided, and there’s something everyone can help with, such as picking or sorting. I also loved the idea of sharing the fruit between the tree owner/steward, volunteers and local community partners. It’s a wonderful way to improve food sovereignty and allow people to give back to their communities.

Bringing Kids and All Of Us Back to Reality

Matthew Gagnon, Vice President

I have been tangentially aware of the problems our kids face as a father of two kids (3 and 7), but I have not taken a deep dive into those issues until now. Of course, my mind immediately went to how our built environment affects these issues and the concrete actions that our community association can take to address them.

The Latest from ‘The New Orleans’

From Rob Attrell, Board Director and Outreach Committee Chair

• Paying the Bills: The Uncomfortable Math of Our Orléans Lifestyle
• If You Build It, They Will Come: A Small Park Shows the Future of Orléans
• The Long Road to Nowhere: Why Good Plans Die at City Hall
• The Kidical Mass is a Fun Family Bike Ride in Orleans, But It’s Also More Than That

Subscribe today and follow the journey at TheNewOrleans.ca.

CA Board of Directors Meeting – October 6 – 7:30 PM

Every month, the Board of Directors of the Community Association holds a meeting to discuss ongoing community association matters. Members of the community and other stakeholders are welcome to attend, please let us know if you’d like to join the meeting via email at [email protected] and we can pass along an invite.

You can also see minutes from previous board meetings here, to see what we’ve been chatting about: Board Meeting Minutes.

Community Association Starter Kit

Here is a decent list to get you started on engaging with your community, but of course there’s also lots you can do that doesn’t involve the association at all, and of course this all might just not be your thing, and that’s OK too (although I didn’t think it was mine either and it definitely is). This list isn’t in a particular order, but I did think about their order while sorting and grouping them.

Community Submission Box

If you want to share something of your own with the community, feel free to let us know about it at the link below. We’d be happy to publish letters from the community in our newsletter and on our website.