First Step - Find inspiration.

Thank you for your interest in our community calendar project.

It seems like an odd thing to want to do - create a charity driven tech inspired communication hub for the downtown eastside. However the inspiration came quite organically from two experiences I had with the non profit community - as an outreach worker and as an event organizer.

As an outreach worker I could’t find enough space for all the community event posters to display them in any meaningful way. I would also need to chase down event and program coordinators for their calendars every week, find time to print them and put them up so that they would get noticed. Another consistent issue was directing people using our services to a physical space that was cluttered with other important messages, for example help to find missing loved ones.

As an organizer I couldn’t find a way to tell a very specific group of people with barriers to communication about upcoming events and changes. A regular phone bank didn’t work because they often didn’t have a phone plan with a number attached. Although resources like Facebook are very popular amongst all ages within the Downtown Eastside, finding a way to meaningfully share events and confirm attendance is difficult for anyone within that.

The solution is both simple and complicated - a “progressive web app” (more info on that at a later date) that will work on any phone device, that’s accessible to people with limited wifi, and that can be printed and used as a physical calendar when needed. Making things run very simply for people trying to connect with their community - public health, food, resources, cultural events, workshops etc. can be a very complicated thing indeed, but we can promise to be persistent!