Next month I’ll have a story about the lifespan of the old community hall, from the fundraising efforts to build it to the decision to give it up to make way for Boyle Renaissance Phase I. This month, however, I want to talk about our community.

We’re all used to hearing how “diverse” Boyle Street community is. I’ve even heard the word “diversity” used as a kind of curse, as if somehow, if we could all be boiled up into one big grey mix, life would be easier and better here. How wrong that way of thinking is!

It’s true that we have one of the largest ranges of cultural and socioeconomic profiles in the city. Boyle Street people are of all ages. We range from residents of expensive condos to people living in their cars or on the street. We are seniors in assisted living or continuing care, we are kids going to neighbourhood schools. We range from First Nations people with heritage going back tens of thousands of years to newcomers who have been here only a few weeks. We speak a dozen main languages — including English, Chinese, Cree, Ukrainian, French, and many more — and even more dialects. We work at everything from service industries to business, from auto repair to the arts. We vote for different candidates. We follow different religions and go to different houses of worship, here in the Boyle Street community or elsewhere in Edmonton. We eat different foods and wear many different styles of clothing.

We have different ideas about helping each other, and about keeping our neighbourhood clean, and about how to behave in public. We have different ways of solving our conflicts with each other — from constructive talk to bad behaviour. Yes, among the many good ways in which we are different, there are a few on the shadow side too.

We all want to be treated with dignity, to live in peace and harmony, to eat properly and sleep safely and stay warm and be happy.

Yet with all our differences, we have a lot in common. We all want to be treated with dignity, to live in peace and harmony, to eat properly and sleep safely and stay warm and be happy. We look around our neighbourhood and we wish it would reflect our natures and fulfill our needs. How do we make that wish come true? By working together. That sounds like a cliché too — but it’s the only way to make our community the best it can be.

It doesn’t have to be complicated. For example, it doesn’t take much to pick up a piece of trash and put it in a trash can. If there isn’t a trash-can nearby, it takes a little more effort to find one. If there aren’t enough trash cans in the neighbourhood, it takes an additional effort to get together and find out how to get more trash cans on our streets. That’s why we get together and work as a community — working together gives us the clout to make our needs known.

City government, when you think of it, isn’t much more than a bunch of people who want to work on neighbourhood needs and get together to do that work efficiently. In Edmonton, we are lucky enough to have a community league system so that people can work at the community level. Community league work takes talk, and patience, and a bit of energy — but if we work together, we get to live in a place we control — it really becomes our neighbourhood.

Yes, there’s a pitch coming: the Boyle Street Community League would like some people who will work on some of our existing and new committees: the LRT committee, the development response committee, the membership committee, and so on. We’d be glad to hear from anyone who would like to join us. But that’s not the only reason why I wrote about community this time. I’d like to encourage everyone in our wonderful neighbourhood to think about celebrating our differences and our similarities all year, together, in the most positive ways we can.

Aside from the weather, which we can’t control, the next year will be what we make of it. Let’s make it a year when we work together to make our home in Boyle Street a safer, healthier, cleaner, more attractive, more lively and, above all, a happier place — for all of us, no matter who we are.