September 12, 2010

This week saw an infusion of energy and enthusiasm into the City. Thousands of new first year students arrived and spent the week learning mostly about their campuses. Full of hope and anxiety about what this next phase in their lives will hold, they capped the week raising money for Cystic Fibrosis and sporting Togas.

This weekend has seen them joined by nearly twenty thousand upper year students, who crowded local streets, buses, restaurants, and bars.

In many ways, the City of Waterloo is a place of two communities: those whose primary experience of our City is inside the boundaries and immediate vicinity of our universities, and those whose primary experience rarely enters the universities.

We have some continuing challenges in places where both communities coexist in the same neighbourhoods as people from the two communities rarely meet and talk with each other. They often keep different hours and have different priorities.

But as long as we focus on what is different, we miss what is shared, and we miss those members in each community who go out of their way to understand and connect with the other.

Both groups enjoy celebrating in their own ways, require peace and quiet for sleep or productive (home)work, and want to be in a place where they feel they belong.

In my platform, I talk about what I think we can do in Northdale and in other neighbourhoods with large student populations. I believe there are certainly changes the City needs to make to provide safer living spaces and to facilitate the development, physically and socially, of more cohesive neighbourhoods.

This weekend, we saw the annual influx of enthusiasm, of energy, and of hope for tomorrow. This is the energy that grows into new ideas and companies, into fights for important environmental and social causes, and into permanent residents of our City.

If we build on what aspirations we share and we seek to understand each other’s priorities and experiences, we have a much better chance of building neighbourhoods and a City where we all feel like we are welcome and safe.

As someone who has stepped from one community into the other, and who is always looking for ways to bring the two together, I am excited to be seeking your support as your councillor, and to getting down to work on building a cohesive community in which we can all belong.