Community Conversation event connects the public with the City

The City of Lethbridge hosted its second Community Conversation of 2023 on Monday with dozens of people coming through the Enmax Centre within the first hour.

Lethbridge residents had the opportunity to gather information about 40 different projects happening across the city while walking around the facility. Multiple booths were set up on the concourse while others were set up just outside the rink at ice level.

Among the booths set up on the concourse was the Lethbridge Sport Council booth, and executive director Susan Eymann told the Herald they were promoting two projects they are currently working on.

“One is to help equity-deserving groups in Lethbridge connect with sport, making sport more welcoming, working with sport organizations to see what is it that we can support you with to make it more welcoming. So we’re promoting a six-part series workshop and we also have wonderful welcome signs with 33 languages included. We are really working on making sport accessible to everyone,” said Eymann.

She said she was happily surprised when most people who stopped by their booth were aware of the sport council. Within the first hour, they had already seen close to 50 people stop by.

Eymann said they asked whoever stopped by to check their “Welcome” sign and let them know if their language was included. For those missing they asked visitors to write their language down on a piece of paper to be added to the banner.

She said they came up with the welcome sign in different languages by asking participants and attendees of Sport Fest for their native language. They also collaborated with Lethbridge Family Services Immigrant Services to find out what type of languages were spoken among the community.

“They have statistics on the languages spoken in Lethbridge and the number of families, so we added the top languages on that list,” said Eymann.

 She said the second project is about developing a volunteer portal specifically for sport in the winter.

“Anyone in the community submits their form to say ‘I want to volunteer for say casinos, I don’t want to volunteer all week, all year long, I just want to volunteer for a specific event’ or ‘I’m interested in being on a board of directors.’ It is about getting people aware of the sport volunteer portal that will be launching in the winter,” said Eymann.

 Some of the agencies with information booths and equipment displays at ice level included Lethbridge Fire and EMS and the Lethbridge Police Service, with the latter displaying not only equipment used by their officers, but also a furry friend.

Program manager of Victim/Witness Services at LPS, Catherine Pooley said she was taking advantage of the event to connect with the community and talk to them about the many ways they can take part in the program.

“We’re still recruiting for Victim Services, so we wanted to make sure that anyone who had questions or maybe hesitations of whether it was a good fit for them we were here to answer those,” said Pooley.

 She said LPS was also answering questions about recruitment of officers and Community Peace Officers (CPO).

 “This was a great chance to connect with the community and we brought our little friend from dogs with wings Timon, who is an eight-month-old yellow lab who is here to do a bit of practice and training, so it was also a great opportunity to meet a service dog that you may not otherwise have the chance to meet,” said Pooley.

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