DBIA wins awards for event promotion, COVID-19 recovery
Peterborough’s Downtown Business Improvement Area (DBIA) won two provincial awards at the Ontario Business Improvement Area Association conference in Niagara Falls recently: Best Special Event and Promotion for the downtown Mac & Cheese festival and Best COVID-19 Recovery.
DBIA executive director Terry Guiel said the Best COVID-19 Recovery was the main award of the conference.
Guiel said the Peterborough DBIA was noted for efforts such as offering COVID-19 kits with Plexiglas dividers and hand sanitizer to member businesses and creating the Boro gift card (usable anywhere downtown) to encourage shopping.
They also had initiatives during the pandemic such as the launch of a website showcasing stores and services downtown — complete with links so people can shop online. Plus the DBIA spent $30,000 to fill and maintain 80 large flower boxes to delineate the pop-up patios created downtown in select onstreet parking spots outside restaurants, allowing people to eat outdoors.
DBIA project manager Dawn Pond is a master gardener, and the DBIA launched the One City Green Team to maintain the miniature gardens (an offshoot of the One City Clean Team, which hires people with various barriers to employment to clean up the downtown).
“It was recognized out of 400 BIAs across Ontario that what we did (to help stimulate business recovery, in the pandemic) was the pinnacle,” Guiel said.
The Mac & Cheese festival was another win for the DBIA: the festival was held in October, and 18 participating restaurants created their own take on the classic dish.
Diners were invited to either go to the restaurants to try the dishes or order them as takeout, and then vote for their favourites.
DBIA communications and marketing manager Hillary Flood organized the event and said that half the participating restaurants saw an increase in sales that they attribute to the festival, “which is huge.”
She said the idea was to promote a comfort food, and macaroni and cheese fit the bill perfectly.
“It brightened a very bleak moment in our collective history,” Flood said.
Downtowns all over Ontario and Canada are having a difficult time, Guiel said: COVID-19 lockdowns affected boutiques and small businesses, while big box stores were allowed to stay open, he pointed out. Plus downtowns are increasingly the epicentres of the homelessness and addiction crises.
“COVID-19 — that at least has a vaccine,” Guiel said. “Poverty, mental-health crises, addiction, homelessness — that doesn’t.”
Late last year, Guiel asked city council to consider paying a large share of the cost — along with a contribution from the DBIA — toward hiring someone to help business owners to cope in situations where a vulnerable person is sleeping in their doorway, for instance.
The “system navigator,” as Guiel calls it, would know who to phone among local social service agencies for help.
While Guiel was in Niagara at the conference on the evening of April 25, city council in Peterborough was voting a final time to support the system navigator position for three years, at a cost of $160,000.
Guiel said his colleagues from across Ontario, gathered at the conference, knew all about the system navigator idea and were hoping that in Peterborough city council would vote to back up the plan with funding.
At one point as awards were being handed out, Guiel got word that the system navigator funding had been approved by city council, and he announced it to the crowd.
“The place erupted (in cheers),” Guiel said, adding that the idea is an innovative one that could get an award at next year’s conference.
He said other BIAs across Ontario hold the DBIA in high esteem: “When we show up at the conference every year, we’re like rock stars.”