Throughout these past several months as a reporter covering a lot of the community events, I’m constantly hearing organizers talking about numbers being down. A bit fewer participants join the activities; a bit fewer funds being raised.
The situation seems to be quite common no matter what kind of events we are talking with a rare exception like Glow Paddle that is still somewhat new entertainment and so far keeps peeking up the numbers. But look at the community calendar, almost all activities you can see scheduled for a week will have fewer people attending.
The Estevan community is awesome. When it comes to supporting the local initiatives, people are so generous. And people are also very conscious, understanding that if we don’t participate, then there will be nothing for our kids and us, that there will be no us, not here. Our shopping local promotion that had thousands of entries in a city of our size once again proved that.
But let's face it, there are only that many rigs drilling around. The future of coal is very unclear. The big Boundary Dam’s carbon capture facility building project is long complete, and there are no new big projects planned. So far, we don’t see any Canadian or international businesses being all over Estevan planning to settle down here.
The financial situation in Western Canada has known better days. I’m not sure what’s going on in the east, but since it’s the global economic problem (there are a lot of explanations to this phase, but I’ll leave it aside for now) I’m guessing that they might be experiencing tough times as well.
Getting back to Estevan, we now see that a lot of events are slowly losing attendance. But on top of that, some of them are losing public interest as well. There might be few explanations to it.
First, when something follows the same scenario every year, it may get old. We are not that big of a city, so same people participate in activities from year to year. Like it was with the Estevan Idol, which then became Estevan Sings. Being an annual event, it had same people performing on stage and same people cheering for them in the stands. So after a few years, the numbers went down and the event disappeared from the Estevan annual calendar. (But when brought back this year after a break it was a hit again.)
Another problem is that many of us just cannot afford to attend every single event and support all the great causes.
We only have so many dollars a month that we can use to help something or someone, to buy raffle tickets (that even if we win, turn into Christmas presents for people we usually don’t know very well), to send kids to camps, to help local charitable groups, centres and initiatives. More and more often I hear that people have to skip some great events, because, since they are fundraisers (for very important and needed organizations) everything is quite expensive and the current middle class can afford to attend probably one or two a year max.
So maybe it’s the time to come together and start combining some of the activities Estevan has to offer. Be it summer camps, or rodeo and fair as it used to be, or any other kind of event. I wasn’t here when rodeo and the fair were held the same week, but now I hear a lot of good memories and raves to that format.
Estevan summer camps are wonderful (I think I visited a good dozen and wrote about many more). They have a lot to offer, they are creative, they are goal-oriented, but most camps this summer also had fewer kids attending.
Cultural, educational, entertaining and community-building events that different groups put together also have a hard time attracting the crowds. (EPS are doing good with their events, but not only are they well thought through and really entertaining, but they are also free of charge, and that’s hard to beat).
I always was taught that when hard times hit, you have to start thinking out of the box. Even if you were eaten, there are at least two ways out.
I’m sure Estevan organizations have many options to keep going and serving their goals, but it’s not the time when we can just follow our regular paths.
And I believe some Estevan events and activities combined together or reorganized will get a second wind and will only win from that.
Hard times are tough to live through, but wonderful for creativity. Hard times bring people together (the lone wolf dies but the pack survives, if you know what I mean), so why not stand to gain from it?
