Howdy neighbour! Gabr’hood gathering, May 11th

Greg Blee

for Climate-12 Action

When it comes to surviving extreme weather or a disaster, neighbours are basically first responders. They can check on each other, render aid, call for professional help if required. But strong neighbourhoods have other important functions: They address social problems like isolation and loneliness, and facilitate the sharing of resources like food, tools, transportation and knowledge.

Plus, they’re fun! As humans, we thrive on social connection. Family may be our basic unit, but next step up is the neighbourhood.

In our work on the Gabriola Climate-12 Action project, we quickly realized that neighbourhoods were key to a proactive response to climate change. Almost every one of our Action Teams realized early on that neighbourhood-based plans made a lot of sense.

Gabriola does have a few well-defined neighbourhoods already, often based on cul-de-sac roads or single-access developments, but others are more diffuse.

To our knowledge, there is no available map that shows and names the various neighbourhoods.

Nor is there an organized communication network within and between neighbourhoods.

To that end, we hope to bring neighbours together on Saturday, May 11th to (literally) put ourselves on the map.

The event will feature maps and info tables from community services, like ESS. We will hear from neighbours who have organized and solved problems together.

A giant map of Gabriola will cover the entire Community Hall floor, on which everyone can stand at the general location of their house and greet or meet their “neighbours.”

Further, we hope to begin the process of formalizing those neighbourhoods—mapping their approximate boundaries, and establishing means for neighbours to keep in touch with each other.

A VIU Geography student will help with the mapping, and we will encourage people to set up ways to stay in touch and share neighbourhood news. That might be email, social media, website, work bees, occasional meetings … whatever each group decides works best.

“Gabr’hoods: Put Yours on the Map” happens Saturday, May 11th, 2pm to 4pm at the Community Hall.