By Eric G Andersen
Blueridge is a very privileged community. We are close to the forests, that so many people love, we are not too far from Deep Cove, Lower Lynn and Lynn Valley and we have so many wonderful people living in Blueridge/Seymour Heights.
We suffer from the same traffic fatigue that hit us all on the North Shore years ago, and we get stuck in the same traffic jams near the Second Narrows Bridge as everybody else.
From the Blueridge Community Association’s (BCA) point of view things are good, but they could always get better.
We would love more residents to attend our meetings – these take place on the second Tuesday of the month in January, March, May (our AGM), September and November.
We try to invite interesting guest speakers at most meetings, and once a year the focus of the meeting is on new residents to Blueridge/Seymour Heights who are specifically invited. This gives them an opportunity to mingle and also meet residents who have lived here longer.
We try to keep the meetings focused on current issues that should be of interest to all the participants. The meetings are held at Blueridge Elementary School (2650 Bronte Drive), but we want to see more participants.
We are very proud of our Blueridge Sharing Garden, that was established about four years ago and which is located on the south side of Carnation Street across the street from Seymour Heights School. Wonderful vegetables are grown there by our volunteers, but it would be very rewarding to see more participants. Whether you wish to rent your own plot at the garden for the year, or you just wish to participate in general, there are opportunities waiting. Seeing more participant in the garden would be wonderful.
Should any local landscaping firms or other companies wish to donate in-kind or with some of their services, that would be most welcome by everyone at the Blueridge Sharing Garden.
As part of the Blueridge Sharing Garden we have our own Little Free Library.
Our big event in Blueridge is Blueridge Good Neighbour Day. It takes place in early June every year at Blueridge Elementary School. This is a wonderful opportunity for the community to work together, and the attendance is always good. Even if our last event did not have terrific weather, we had about 1,800 participants. All the planning and set up and take down could not be done without our many volunteers, but we would love to see more join us! The more residents help us out with the event, the bigger and better it gets, and the more fun it will be for everyone.
We will start the planning for Blueridge Good Neighbour Day at the end of January and will be meeting monthly before the big event on June 2. We want more people to help out with this, and for newcomers to Blueridge in particular, this is an amazing way to get to meet a lot of local residents.
We would also like to see more North Vancouver sponsors and donors for this event. Our Silent Auction will need a lot of prizes!
Everyone living in Blueridge/Seymour Heights is automatically a member of the Blueridge Community Association. No need to sign up or pay a membership fee. How do we reach out to our members? We publish a newsletter three times a year (usually March, May and October).
The articles are written by local residents and cover a wide variety of Blueridge-related topics. We would like to see more articles for our newsletter and would urge our local friends and neighbours to write about matters that are affecting Blueridge.
The distribution of our newsletters to our 1,500 homes in Blueridge/Seymour Heights is done strictly by volunteers, but it would be wonderful to have a larger pool of volunteers.
Monthly we also have the Blueridge Bulletin that goes out to about 525 recipients. We want more people to sign up for it – and we are also looking for advertisers for this e-mail.
The BCA offers many other activities (hosting All-Candidates Meetings before elections, a website (blueridgeca.org) and a Facebook page, a babysitter and house- and dog-sitter directory, group discount for fireplace and furnace servicing, a scholarship, electronic recycling, a greeting team for new residents etc) and we would be happy to share all that information with you.
We want all local residents to contact us with their ideas, suggestions, complaints, and let’s see if we can work on this together.
In short: we want even more community involvement to continue making Blueridge/Seymour Heights a wonderful and enviable place for everyone to live.
We can be reached at info@blueridgeca.org
Taking a step back we would like the newly elected Council to make the District of North Vancouver’s (DNV) website much more user-friendly than it currently is. We also want Council to better understand the work done by all the volunteers in the DNV and work closer with the many local community associations.
Finally we want the TransLink buses to be better coordinated, enabling a smooth transfer of passengers to and from our local bus, the 214, at the Phibbs Exchange. Too many times this bus leaves the Phibbs Exchange minutes if not seconds before the bus from e.g. downtown arrives. Instead of letting the buses wait at the top of Sechelt Drive, it would make so much more sense to let the buses wait slightly longer at Phibbs Exchange before they head towards Blueridge.
Wouldn’t it make sense to better serve the public? We want this change to give everyone an incentive to take the bus instead of driving cars whenever possible.
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