Campbell River Canada Day 2012 in Review

From my Perspective

Canada Day is Campbell River’s biggest day of the year. Thousands of people flood the downtown area from the Community Centre all the way to the Foreshore (not to mention the stuff going on in Willow Pt. & at the Spit). I don’t know what your favourite part of the day is, but mine is the Fireworks. Its my favourite because its the time I get to sit down with my family and enjoy the show. For the rest of the day though (and a few days surrounding it), I get to serve the city by helping out in the background.

If you participated in any of the awesome fun at Canada Day, you probably saw it all a little differently than I did. I was up at 0500h and was already on Day 3 of setup.

Responsibilities

Essentially, I was responsible for some of the logistics, the social media (together with Rhonda Harper from the Visitor Info Centre) and some of the website stuff. The biggest part of all of it was all the tents, tables, chairs and fencing for the Pancake Breakfast, Kids Fest, Salmon BBQ, Main Stage area, the Animal Exhibit & the Parade marshalling area. Over the course of the weekend, I helped or oversaw pickup & return, loading & unloading, setup & teardown of 125 chairs, 24 tables, 28 tents and 30 panels of fencing. I didn’t do it alone though…not a chance.

In order to Pull Off a Great Event, you need to plan everything, so one of my tasks was to get at least a bit of a grip on all the ins and outs of every aspect of every event so that we know who’s looking after what, where our resources are going and so that when we review, we can streamline and make it better for next time…so I needed help.

Volunteers

Over the course of 4 days for the stuff I was looking after, I had 20 volunteers give 142 hours of time and a few buckets of sweat. That’s not including the time that the Canada Day Team members put in who were helping me as well. I saw Ian and Dean put in at least 12 hours each as well as loaning vehicles and trailers. Most of my volunteer team was made up of people from our Converge Church Family. It was fun to serve our city together to help make it a great event.

Another person that cannot go without mention is Jim Lilburn (some call him Mr. Salmon Festival) who for year after year has tirelessly put in literally countless hours into these events to make them what they are. He helped me in every single piece that I was responsible for.

Recap

Bottom line? Canada Day wouldn’t have been what it was without the volunteers and those serving in the background. I had a blast being a part of it and I’m really looking forward to next year. Our great Canada Day team will be meeting soon, and we’ll be bringing some suggestions in order to review the event.

Please comment:

Have YOUR say. What suggestions do you have for the Campbell River Canada Day team?

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