Community
Posted by Tom on December 9, 2009 at 12:33 am
I guess it comes as a result of living in a big city, but since we’ve moved here I’ve picked up on a lot of very cool ideas, a lot of which have to do with communicating about local issues. For example, there’s a message board called Urban Toronto where people discuss rant about local events and changes, and there’s sites like blogTO or Torontoist, blogs which write about local happenings and aggregate local news. Of course there’s also a bunch of local free weekly newspapers and radio stations.
Sure, this helps contribute to the stereotypical Torontonian who doesn’t know about anything that goes on outside the city limits (okay, so maybe they know a couple things that happen in the “greater Toronto area”), but it also provides a sense of community and city pride. These outlets provide people with easy access to things they probably should know about (and commentary on it), everything from major city budget issues to plans for a popular city landmark to be torn down.
I’ve started thinking a lot lately about how these ideas can be applied to smaller centers - namely, Corner Brook and the surrounding area. There is ongoing work happening at SWGC to create a community radio station based out of the school cafeteria and the group organising it are putting a lot of effort into ensuring that it is a community radio station and not university based. It’s going to start out being based online, eventually branching onto terrestrial airwaves, and if it works (where working would mean that people want to listen and participate in it) I think that it could mean a renewed sense of civic pride for Corner Brook. People could tune in to hear commentary (both positive and negative) on local issues, and when people actually know what these issues are, they’ll create opinions and want to get involved.
I would absolutely love to be involved with this, and help bring this to Corner Brook and the area, and I would particularly like to help bring this issues and ideas to the “younger” generation. For a long time, decisions in the city and the surrounding communities have been made by an “older” generation, largely because the younger generation is disinterested. Using methods like the radio station, or a community oriented blog or whatever, maybe we can get the younger generation caring. I mean, they’re going to have to run the city someday, right?
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