Getting involved with our local community association is the most meaningful thing I think I’ve personally done in the last handful of years aside from having children. Even as an introvert, getting to know my neighbours and step out of my social bubble a little to meet the people who live around me has been incredibly rewarding, and we’re really just getting started.
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.
Join the CA
- Sign up as a Community Association Member
- Members can help plan and run events, they have a massive stake in the direction the CA takes on initiatives, community engagement, and advocacy.
- New rules in Ontario mean that to be a legally recognized voting member of the association, you need to register with us. It isn’t that hard, but it does require you providing us with some information.
Staying in Touch
- Complete our 2024 Community Outreach Survey
- We created a survey in December to gauge interest in existing and new community events from the association, and also to get a sense of how residents feel about the community and its present and future.
- It has been very interesting to read these responses so far, please keep them coming!
- Join the Community Forum
- Chat with and get to know your neighbours on a variety of topics, including planning and running community events and activities with people in the neighbourhood.
- Send us an email
- We love getting email from residents, usually they are very positive messages and if appropriate we act on them or get answers to your questions.
- Send something along to [email protected].
- Join the CA Facebook Group
- The Facebook Group is by far our biggest platform (with lots of members way outside our boundaries). However, between the Facebook algorithm and the singular feed of the group with no filtering or sorting or categorization, we don’t find it a particularly useful platform for productive community discussion. This is the reason we’re experimenting with the Community Forum, which has no social media algorithm and allows all kinds of categorization of messages.
Events and Activities
- Check out the Events Calendar
- The Association hosts a number of bigger events over the course of the year, but we’re hoping to organize and facilitate lots of smaller ones as well. You can also attend an event hosted by the CA without doing any work at all.
- Enter our monthly photo contest
- In November, we launched a photo contest where residents vote on their favorite photo of the month from inside our neighbourhood borders.
- Every month a new theme is chosen to help spark some creativity when you’re out in the neighbourhood.
- Volunteer with planning or running an event
- If there is an event you’d like to run or just participate in, let us know and we can try to facilitate and/or spread the word to anyone in the area.
- Reach out via email ([email protected]) or the Community Forum to volunteer
- Attend a board meeting (as an observer)
- Our monthly board meetings (usually every 2nd Monday in the month) are not private, ask for an invite via email and we will add you to the virtual event.
Follow News from the CA
- Subscribe to the Newsletter
- Every month we release a newsletter with some community-focused columns from our Board members, and community updates we get from different places around the neighbourhood.
- Read our updated 2024-29 Strategic Plan
- In September as part of our last Annual General Meeting (AGM), we released a strategic plan for 2024-29.
- This includes an updated mission statement and vision for engaging with and working on behalf of the community to make the places we live better.
- Subscribe to website updates (RSS)
- If you use RSS syndication (you know who you are) we post timely articles advertising events, you’re encouraged to subscribe to our feed to keep up with the latest news.
- Follow the Association on Mastodon/Fediverse
- The Association has a Mastodon account that we will gladly update more often if we see activity in the community on that platform, right now we mostly use it for sharing newsletter columns and updates from our events.
