Representatives of about 25 different organisations, from big business to sports to social and service groups, gathered at ArtsForward to collaborate with one another at the Connected Community Planning Meeting. While this was a good sampling of the organisations in the area, there are still many more who were not able to attend and who the organisers hope to reach as the project progresses.

While the Town of Neepawa has made attempts before to create a one-stop shop for event information, they all ended up being short lived. Now that organisations are beginning to fill their calendars again in the wake of two years of pandemic closures, it seemed an opportune time to revisit the idea and try to get community organisations to work together on the project. The event was co-hosted by the town’s recreation department and ArtsForward, which was the venue for the meeting.

While the impetus behind organising the meeting was the idea of an events calendar or similar organising document, getting all of these diverse organisations in conversation brought out many other ways in which the community could be sharing resources and avoiding stretching any one group, place, or person too thin. One of the ideas that came out was collaborating more broadly on town-wide events, such as the Chamber Fair, Canada Day Celebration, or Makers’ Market Festival, to extend the reach of those events. Other organisations offered community spaces they had available for use by different groups. Still others, such as a local church and the hockey team, identified themselves as great sources of new volunteers for local events.

An overall theme in the conversation turned out to be the shared challenge of getting audiences to come back to in-person events. While nothing concrete was decided at the meeting, there were a lot of ideas proposed, particularly with regards to coordinating events with one another. With the purpose of the meeting being to get the word out and start the conversation, in that respect it was certainly a success.