Wearing bunny ears, Osoyoos Festival Society volunteer Jessie Smythe holds an adorable, soft lionhead rabbit at the petting zoo in 2017. (Richard McGuire photo)
Dale Boyd
Osoyoos Times
Town of Osoyoos staff are moving forward on recommendations that came out of a meeting with an alliance of volunteer event organizers responsible for most of the town’s events.
The meeting held on Feb. 13 was spurred on by a presentation to town council by local volunteer and event coordinator Debbie Dundass in January, who spoke on behalf of the group.
Recommendations include streamlining processes to acquire provincial Resort Municipality Initiative (RMI) funding and a dedicated town staff to support local events.
Shirley Baker, treasurer of the Osoyoos Festival Society, said town staff, council members, Destination Osoyoos staff and business representatives in attendance at the meeting were open to discussing the recommendations.
Those include a central online hub for volunteer recruitment managed by the town. There are plenty of examples to look at, Baker said, like a similar program in Kamloops.
“It wouldn’t be like you were recreating the wheel, you could piggyback off of some of these communities and set something up,” Baker said. “The idea then is to get people interested to go on that site, sign up, and like snow birds who come to town and that kind of stuff. And that the town maintains it and keeps advertising it so that it flashes up and people start thinking about it.”
• Read more: Alliance of volunteers lobbies Town of Osoyoos for event support
Another suggestion was for the downtown revitalization project to add community poster boards to advertise event information for tourists and locals.
Further, draft Guidelines and an application for RMI funding was presented to the group by town CAO Allan Chabot.
“So our meeting (last week) kind of let the rubber hit the road and see what can be done,” Baker said. “We’re going to have another meeting in a few weeks, but there were a few things that came out of this meeting they are going to try to implement.”
Gerald Davis, director of community services for the Town of Osoyoos, said the point person for events in town will continue to be Sarah Dynneson, program supervisor, and Davis will be available to event coordinators to source different needs from different departments within the town.
The meeting with town staff and volunteer groups was a positive step forward for the issues faced locally, Davis said.
“I think it opened up an opportunity for conversation between those issues and how we can address those issues. I’m sure we can make a pretty direct impact for the future and help achieve what they want to do, which is making it easier for special event applications or for grant writing. And also to attract some volunteers,” Davis said.
The implementation of a website as a central hub for volunteers should be easily achievable for the town, he said.
“I think it would be significant for locals, especially people who can just put your name out there to say they’re interested in doing certain things or being part of certain events and then that could be just .there for any of the main groups or anybody, in reality, where they can just go to the town website and actually review and see if there is anybody they can recruit from that kind of database.”
The dialogue between event organizers and the town will be ongoing, with another meeting set for early April.
“One of the items that we have discussed is maybe we can meet with all these large event organizers at least once a year just to get a better perspective of any of their concerns, or clarify certain items that they may have,” Davis said. “Other than that, it was just a really good opportunity to voice some concerns, bring up any issues that we’ve had in the past, or current ones, and just go forward in a very positive mode.”
