Move to Colombia brings end to ‘Live Local’
‘What I really liked about it was it brought together a whole collective’ — Juliana Gomez, site founder
WATERLOO REGION — You might expect the owner and administrator of a website that encourages residents to buy local would live in Waterloo Region.
But last year, the Live Local K-W site — which promoted shopping exclusively local for one week of the year — was run by Juliana Gomez from more than 4,000 km away in Medellin, Colombia after she moved there from Waterloo in October 2015.
“That’s part of the charm of K-W for me,” said Gomez in a phone interview from Colombia, explaining how eight people helped her with on-the-ground logistics for the weeklong event from Sept. 17-23, 2017. Most of them were strangers who saw the value in what she was doing and wanted to help.
“The really impactful thing for me was that spirit of involvement,” Gomez said. The website also operated in 2014 and 2015 when Gomez lived in Waterloo, but she took a break in 2016 after her move to South America.
But now, Gomez has decided to shut the website down for good after failing to find someone a little closer to K-W to carry on its legacy.
“I had high hopes someone would adopt it.”
It wasn’t a love or a passion for this region that prompted Gomez to start Live Local K-W three years ago — quite the opposite, actually. Her family immigrated to Waterloo Region from Colombia in 1997 when she was six years old and it was supposed to be just a stepping-stone on their way to Montreal, but her family decided to settle permanently in Waterloo.
Gomez hated the city and the region.
So much, in fact, she purposely fled to the University of Ottawa to study communications and political science instead of attending Wilfrid Laurier or the University of Waterloo, but a lack of job prospects after graduation meant she had to return.
“When I finished I moved back home, and I was dreading it,” she said.
“I saw it as a step backwards.” She eventually turned that negative energy into something positive by volunteering with several local groups, including Radio Laurier (a student-run campus and community radio station) and K-W Poetry Slam in the hopes of making some friends and establishing some local connections.
“That was the turning point for me. I realized there were some pretty cool people and pretty cool events here,” she said.
By then it was 2014 and Gomez launched Live Local K-W as a personal challenge to spend a week shopping only at local, independent businesses. She went to Seven Shores Café in Uptown Waterloo instead of Starbucks, bought her groceries at the St. Jacobs Farmers’ Market, and only ate at locally owned restaurants
That first year consisted of just a very basic website and a Twitter account to document her journey, but she managed to get 150 people and 44 businesses to join the challenge.
Businesses offered special discounts and deals for those participating in the challenge, and it was up to each participant to decide what “local” meant to them.
In 2015, she endured a breakup and she was fired from her job, so with nothing to tie her down she decided to move back to Colombia that October, after Live Local K-W had wrapped up following the week of Sept. 13-19.
More than 200 people signed up that year, and she included a map of all participating businesses on her website.
Gomez also encouraged people to “play” local and she planned a range of activities, from trivia games to a poetry slam, every night of the week.
Once she moved south, however, life in Colombia became busy and chaotic, and she admits it felt “super weird” to try and run the local initiative from thousands of kilometres away. So, in 2016, Live Local K-W went on hiatus.
Gomez then moved 500 km north from Bogotá to the city of Medellin, learned computer programming and adopted two cats.
With a little more stability in her life, she relaunched Live Local in 2017 with eight other people, with the hope that someone who would fall in love with the project and adopt it for their own.
She signed 300 people up for the challenge, along with about 75 businesses, and Live Local K-W ran from Sept. 23-27.
But no one wanted to take control of the website. So in May, when she received a reminder that the annual $150 US hosting fee would soon be due, she logged on and formally ended the site.
Samantha Kristoferson, coowner of K-W Professional Organizers, collaborated with Gomez on the project and was involved as both a business owner and as a shopper.
“What I really liked about it was it brought together a whole collective,” she said, ranging from local farmers and café owners, to restaurants and clothing stores. “I’m sad there wasn’t someone to curate it for her — she brought such passion and energy to the project.”
Yet Gomez is confident the site fulfilled its purpose of helping the buy-local movement take hold in this region. “For me, it’s helping people pay for dance class or to paint their kitchen, rather than paying for a yacht somewhere.”
She expects to spend the next few years living in Colombia, but may return to Waterloo Region some day — something she never expected to happen when she first moved back to the region about five years ago.
“My goal was to share the value I find in this community, and it reached that goal, so I thought ‘OK, my work here is done.’”