By Sam Schechter, Burnaby Now March 11, 2011
On Saturday, March 5, Burnaby Family Life celebrated 40 years of service to the community. We celebrated in style with orchids on the tables, special handkerchiefs with our logo for each guest, a band that played after an elegant dinner, and people were all dressed up like we were reliving our high school prom.
Now, here I am in the aftermath, taking care of a few loose ends, looking at the photos from the night, and I'm wondering what it really means ... our celebration of 40 years.
We produced a little video for the event that I put together. I wrote the script for the voice-over, and executive director Jeanne Fike and I did the recordings down the hall.
After looking through 40 years of annual reports and old photos, reading newspaper clippings and listening to some of the longtime staff recall stories from years ago - after that and putting together the video and organizing the event, you'd think that I'd have some sense of what this was all about.
Strangely, it wasn't until today that it finally made sense to me. Aside from working here at Burnaby Family Life, I also teach university students. Right now, my class is studying social media articles, and I spent both of my days off this weekend reading and marking their papers. One common theme in their work was a discussion of the concepts of community in social media. Indeed, how people use social media is influencing our concept of community, but sitting at my desk today, I realized that's what our 40-year history is really about: community.
Yes, Burnaby Family Life offers more than 100 programs and services, but it's not about the number. Yes, our staff collectively speak 40 languages, but it's not about the number. Yes, we started with a $200 grant from city hall and now our budget is in the millions, but it's not about the number. And yes, we've been helping people for 40 years, but it's still not about the number.
It's about community.
We're the village that raises a child in an urban society where we just don't know our neighbours that well anymore. We're the open arms a newcomer needs when they don't speak the language or know many people. We're the friends who will listen when you need somebody to be there for you. Burnaby Family Life is about building and defining the 21st-century concept of community.
That's what we're celebrating. As the traditional notions of community are changing, we're celebrating that we're supporting a new definition of community.
It's a community that must be built by people who see the need for a strong social connection between people.
It's built from the grass roots and reaches out to people who need this sense of community, not just in their home country or in social media and not just with neighbours they scarcely know, but a community that links people together face-to-face in learning, friendship, empowerment and support here in our shared home.
We're helping to build this community; we're helping to define this community.
We've been doing this for 40 years, and that's what we're celebrating.
Sam Schechter is the communications and resource development coordinator for Burnaby Family Life. See them online at www.burnabyfamilylife.org. For photos from the Burnaby Family Life celebration, see page 15 of today's paper.
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