VICTORIA—A unique effort by Victoria’s new mayor to meaningfully engage citizens is creating a buzz in British Columbia’s capital city.
Not long after Lisa Helps took office last December, she began holding “Community Drop-Ins” at city hall for two hours every second Friday. Previous mayors had held one-on-one 10-minute meetings with members of the public once a month, but Helps felt more was needed.
Through the drop-ins she hopes to “build community and a sense of belonging,” she says.
“I guess I consider myself a community builder by nature and by trade and you can’t build community one-on-one. And I know from my time working in the community that people, just regular people, have really good ideas and also really good solutions sometimes to other people’s problems,” Helps told the Epoch Times.
“And I knew from experience that convening people together to have a conversation was a good thing, and I thought as mayor, ‘I’ll just try this and see what happens.' And it’s been absolutely spectacular.”
