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January 3, 2007
Mountain View Banners preview
Here's a little preview of our lovely new 2007 banners. Thanks to Lilli, Sharole and Stacey for posing, for their hard work getting them ready.
Mountain View's Banners - the Story So Far...
by Sharole Tylor
Since 2001, some Mountain View residents have been working on small neighbourhood improvement projects: colourful street safety signs, street curb bulletin boards, and a country lane.
A Mountain View resident artist, Jeannie Kamins, decided to pursue something bigger. She applied to the Parks Board for a grant to create community-made banners on Fraser from 25th to 31st. Jeannie created a template design and organized meetings in the lane where people painted the banners with their own Mountain View community scenes. Additional funding came from local merchants and Little Mountain Neighbourhood House.
The banners were colourful and unique. When someone mentioned Mountain View at a community meeting or city sponsored event, the comment was, "Oh, the place with the great banners."
But, as with anything, the hand made banners had a limited lifespan. The neighbours got together and planned to expand the banners, making them more colourful and plentiful to line the business district. The business district is slowly building and diversifying so they wanted to help continue the trend by making the street as attractive as possible.
The neighbourhood was successful in receiving a generous grant from the Parks Board in May 2006. (In 2005 our first application was turned down, but it was with great regret that the Parks Board committee did so. They were very aware of what a difference the banners had made to the business district on Fraser but we didn’t meet one of their specific grant criteria at the time). Unfortunately, the dollar amount fell a little short of the budget amount which needed to cover the banner costs as well as the artist fees, paint, brushes and other important expenses. The Mountain View neighbours wanted to replace the existing 36 banners and hang many more, hopefully running from 24th avenue to 31st.
So there were a few options to raise funds, one of which was to sell the old banners. The city banner program coordinator had offered to keep the old banners up until the new banners were ready to replace them. At that time the old banners could be cleaned and auctioned off to businesses and neighbours to raise funds.
Unfortunately, the city banner department saw fit to remove the old banners prematurely and threw out the carefully hand-painted works of art. The neighbourhood was extremely distraught as a number of people who helped paint banners wanted to purchase the ones they had worked on. Despite the efforts of the kind people at city hall, the banners were never located.
In addition to losing what little revenue the old banners would have generated, the premature removal of the banners ensures there is now an additional installation cost that was not in the budget. So the dilemma now is how many banners do we cut out? Which of the expense items do we cut? All the work being done is by 5 or 6 volunteers who live and work in the neighbourhood. These volunteers are already donating time, money and material. In the absence of a resident artist, the volunteers have to come up with a tentative game plan until such a time as an artist/facilitator steps forward to help.
Ms. McKinnon from the Wine Castle has offered to canvass the the businesses to see if they will be willing to donate. At the Keep Vancouver Spectacular event, several people donated money. Cedar Cottage Neighbourhood House is volunteering to handle the funds and issue tax receipts for generous donations to the banner fund. McBride Annex, Little Mountain Out-of-School Care and Kensington Community Centre have all offered to hold painting workshops.
While there is a generous amount of support for the Mountain View banner project, we still have a few pressing issues to work out. So far we’ve had little luck finding an artist willing to run the workshops. The Parks Board has a time limit in which the grant money needs to be utilized. The Big Bold Beautiful Banner Company, who is going to be sewing and pre-screening the banners, requires a 2 month window to create the banners. This takes us into fall/winter. So it looks as if Fraser Street will be barren of colour until early 2007 when it will be bright and beautiful again just in time for spring.
Posted by Mike Klassen at 11:12 PM |
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