Love My Hood website wins 2 awards and gaining neighbour participation

As a child growing up in the Forest Heights area of Kitchener, Michael May was friends with his neighbours and describes how his community helped each other and looked out for one another.

But contrary to when he was a kid, today, May sayshis family is the only one on their street who spends time on their porch.

"A number of years ago, I had started to talk to folks at the city about the need to look more seriously at our neighbourhoods and how they're growing and developing, and in particular how we can help neighbours come together and spend more time together," he said.

Out of his passion and vision came Kitchener's Love My Hood neighbourhood strategy.

"In the beginning we didn't know what Love My Hood was," May said. "We didn't know what would be in a neighbourhood strategy, but we all agreed there's a lot more work we could be doing together."

Success for the website

The initiative began in February 2017. The city offers a number of tools and financial resources for neighbourhood projects such as community gardens and traffic calming strategies using painted crosswalks.

The new Love My Hood website launched just three months ago and it recently won two marketing and communications awards.

May, who is the deputy chief administrative officer at the City of Kitchener, said some people judge success by the awards, but that is "absolutely not" how he sees it.

Instead, he said success for Love My Hoodcomes in the form of community involvement. Many people gave their input as to what they would like to see in a neighbourhood strategy.

"We engaged over 5,000 Kitchener residents, which is really cool if you think about it, that's the equivalent of three people for every street in the city," he said.

Changing perspectives

It was surprising how quickly people got involved with Love My Hood, but May said it was also surprising how city hall had to change its thinking and perspective.

Despite there being passionate people at city hall who want to build better neighbourhoods, they had to start seeing residents as experts to accomplish that goal.

Right now, May doesn't feel there is the same neighbourhood connection like there was when he was young.

What he wants out of Love My Hood is for his kids to be able to reminisce on their childhood neighbourhood when they're grown, "and it sounds very similar to the neighbourhood I grew up in."