We’re excited to report that Eva Marie Clarke has been hired by Boyle Street Community League as our new Community Program and Membership Animateur. Eva comes to us after a stellar communications and programming career. She will reach out into the community through personal contacts and media to encourage membership and participation and to plan for programs that our community wants and needs.

The grand opening of the Boyle Street Community Centre is less than a year away, and the summer of 2012 will be a time of getting to know our centre and celebrating its place in the heart of our community. We want our centre to be a place where we can all feel comfortable and a part of the action, no matter who we are. We want to meet our neighbours from the next block or the next community. We want to share our place and our programs with everyone!

The community centre is for fun and friends and family. It’s going to be both new and old-fashioned: new walls and programs, old-fashioned homey atmosphere, and welcomes. It’s a new song, but the tune is familiar. You’ll be seeing Eva out and about, taking the measure of the community and encouraging you to be part of the music. And Eva is carrying our community league phone, so if you have ideas for what you’d like to do in the community, particularly in the new centre, give her a call at (780) 422-5857.

Meanwhile, we continue to work together with the Chinese Community and Riverdale Community League on a pan-community protest against the arbitrary route assignment of the downtown part of the future west-to-southeast LRT line. After a huge investment of community time in the consultation process, we were deeply disappointed (to say the least) when the LRT planners came back with the same route, “tweaked” slightly to avoid destroying the cultural buildings on 102 Avenue, but no different in principle. After putting two-way trains through the Chinatown (Harbin) Gate, destroying the aesthetic and symbolic nature of the area, the route cuts a tunnel entrance right between the cultural buildings and the Chinese elders’ mansions and Chinese Multicultural Centre on the north side of 102 Avenue. The result is a huge trough and blockade right in the centre of historic Chinatown.

The community has worked hard through the LRT Working Group to gain a consensus on our recommendation. We all agreed that if the LRT was going to work in Boyle Street community, the route should be moved one block north to 102A Avenue. Now, we are in the same place we were almost exactly one year ago. We must go again to protest to Transportation and Infrastructure Committee of City Council on November 15, and then to Council a week later. Check the City of Edmonton website for details. If you also disagree with the destruction of the viable cultural area of old Chinatown along Harbin Road, please sign up to speak against the recommended route.

The community centre is for fun and friends and family. It’s going to be both new and old-fashioned: new walls and programs, old-fashioned homey atmosphere, and welcomes. It’s a new song, but the tune is familiar.

In August, our board passed a statement on non-market housing, supporting a reasonable balance of non-market housing in our rapidly-growing neighbourhood. Development over the next ten years will see a huge growth in market housing, which will have its impacts on our community. We pledged that during our growth and change we will also support better options for our neighbours who are homeless or underhoused, and will work for a stronger, safer, healthier neighbourhood together, as befits “the community with heart in the heart of the city.”

In other news, we’ve been working to save an historic house at 10434 91 Street. One of the oldest houses in our neighbourhood, and one of the fewer than 80 freestanding houses left in Boyle Street, the house was threatened by a high-density development. After talks with the community league and city, the developer has made a preliminary commitment to save the house. Now we hope it’s simply a matter of working out the details. Anyone who is interested in our historic preservation issues can give us a call and we’d be glad to have you volunteer for the historic inventory and monitoring project we hope we can carry out.

One of the tasks our animateur will be doing immediately will be putting our website up and getting our own domain active, as well as looking at social media, so that we have more ways to talk with friends and neighbours in Boyle Street and nearby communities about participation, programs, and issues. Look for an announcement soon. You’ll also be hearing from us in more traditional media: newsletters, Boyle McCauley News, and so on. And we hope we’ll be hearing lots from you, too!

_You can reach Community Animateur Eva at (780) 422-5857 or e-mail programs.boylestreet@gmail.com