The Otter Lake Community Assembly’s first official meeting on Saturday saw members narrow down a select few projects the group will focus its efforts on over the coming weeks and months.
After a lively discussion from the roughly 20 attendees in which some project ideas were removed and others refined, the group decided it will organize a community garden and help the municipality of Otter Lake put on a free tree day on June 7.
“We are going to make a proposal to the council for the community garden,” said organizer Thomas Villeneuve, adding that they need the go-ahead from Otter Lake council to use the RA grounds before submitting an application to the municipality’s call for community projects due next month.
He said the free tree day is also going to be a perfect occasion to stir up interest for the community garden and for the assembly. “We are going to try to tie those events together to raise excitement and raise awareness about having a garden,” he said.
The group held its first get-together in April, a potluck where Villeneuve and his family explained the project to 80 or so people at the Otter Lake RA. That meeting concluded with a group brainstorm where attendees voiced projects they would like to see in the community.
Since that meeting, Villeneuve and other organizers created five categories of projects attendees had brainstormed – farm to table, education and skills, collaboration, special projects and town enhancement.
On Saturday, all ideas were posted on the walls of the RA building and attendees were given a chance to move those projects into different categories as they saw fit. Then, the group transitioned into a discussion about which projects to tackle first.
Attendee Kat MacGregor, who has experience in community-based agriculture and has worked on farms across the country, said while she is for the idea of a community garden, they can end up to be more than organizers had bargained for.
“People really love the idea of community gardens, but when you are dealing with natural systems there is a lot of complexity and knowledge that is required to find success,” she said, adding that there might be more financial investment required than the maximum $20,000 the project could receive from the municipality’s participatory budgeting initiative.
Rachelle Villeneuve, a special needs educator and mother of two young children who was attending the assembly for the first time, said she would like to see the group start projects related to learning and development, such as building a treehouse for children.
“There’s a lot of children in the Pontiac that have special needs, that are high-energy kids, that have sensory issues [ . . . ] and we don’t have enough stuff for the children to be able to play with,” she said, adding that she wanted to come out and be a voice for the young parents in the community.
“I knew that there were no parents at the meetings, so I thought it was important to be at least the parent here [ . . . ] My children are both in school next year, and I find it really important to have projects for the kids.”
Thomas said he was encouraged by the attendees’ engagement and willingness to take initiative. “We need to get people engaged, we need people to feel like they are part of the process right away, and this was the way that we came up with to do that,” he said.
“Putting those projects up, I think it was a really big hit, people moving them around, it got them to take ownership of those projects.”
MacGregor said while she thinks things are going in the right direction in terms of community engagement, people might need to be signed up for roles instead of volunteering for them.
“We haven’t been taught to be part of a community, so we might need to have roles assigned to people,” she said. “Not everyone is happy to step up, but a lot of people are willing to step in.”
The assembly’s next meeting will be sometime in June. If you would like to get in touch with the community assembly, the email is info@olcac.ca.
