@ Christina – I am glad you found my blog! I told you, it *is* really easy to find (and soon enough, it’ll become even EASIER!). Nancy and I will be pro-active in greeting new GDs

@ Sarah – I think you would be an awesome Green Greeter if you wanted to join

When we looked for new venue a couple of years back we asked our modest mailing list for suggestions and did a straw poll in the pub about location – for whatever reason, most indicated they wouldn’t even go up to Main or Commercial and wanted to stay as central as possible with good transit links. We spent a lot of time hunting for a locally run small business that served organics, all in a free space for up to 100 people. But we just couldn’t find anything that also fit the location criteria. Maybe that place exists but we needed to move asap so kind of ran out of time. When we decided to move to Steamworks we actually heard many positive comments about how accessible it had become, from the transportation side of things. We even started getting people from North Van, Surrey and Bowen Island coming. So yeah, I hear you about Rhizome but we’d have to know people would go before uprooting. I feel we can overcome the inclusion issues in the current venue, maybe even accepting that we’re heading mainstream as Nancy puts it….or am I naïve in thinking that we can avoid the yuppie-hippie divide in this town?

As for social accessibility, we have struggled to get people to be more inclusive/welcoming and take more ownership of the event but it can be hard getting the message across. I used to be a regular at the Green Drinks mothership (London, England) and people there seem to have more of a natural inclination to chat to strangers, partly due to the GDs being so well established but mostly due to the pub culture in the UK. We don’t have that working for (or against!) us here and are also often dealing with the chilly social climate of Vancouver that is unlike most places I’ve seen. No excuses though – bringing people together is the whole point of Green Drinks so it’s something we’ve been working on. Using name tags has really helped and we’ve done some simple ice breakers a couple of times, and shall do again. We’ve also started experimenting with outdoor events and hope to do that again. Once someone finds the time…

Your suggestion of green greeters is a good one…let me know how you envision this working and we can give it a go. I’d also love to explore the survey thing with you and any community building stuff that might work. And improving communication among Green Drinkers without having to spam their email.

Rika’s working in Victoria for a year so it’s down to Lyda and I officially for the time being…but we’ve got so many like you with fabulous energy to tap into and turn Green Drinks into the vision as all have. Let me know! If you email our GDs yahoo account you’ll get Lyda but I assume you can get my email address through this rather lovely blog of yours.

Christina

ps.. the May GDs event possibly will be a Green Drinks/30 Days of Sustainability wrap up party…hope to have details soon. Sadly I won’t be there…

pps…you say the sweetest things…charmer!

I suspect Steamworks is as much about location as anything. It also may be to continue pushing ‘green’ increasingly into mainstream (I’m still blown away by the numbers of people, even in Vancouver, who don’t really take environmental initiatives seriously – eg. still drive cars instead of use transit!!) So steamworks may be more strategic that you’d think. or maybe not.

Last night was my first time at Green Drinks and I share some of your feelings. Overall, I thought all of the people I met were awesome. My main complaint was that everyone was talking about environmental issues! I guess that’s the point of the evening, though. It’s just a little draining when you work for an environmental organization and your entire working life is spent talking about environmental issues. I guess I just like to talk about other things after work!