Message from Heart 2 Soul Fest
As a community development coordinator, the challenges are great when it comes to forming a strategy. By engaging the community, one must keep all lines of communication open. Participation on various local community committees is a must. With strategic partnerships and alliances, one can then understand the needs of the area. It is one thing to obtain information from the news, but to be involved and take action in some sort of capacity is another and better way to know what is truly happening on the ground of each neighborhood. One has to be able to reach out to local agencies, churches, organizations, local businesses, and the community as a whole to truly understand and make change. This can be a great task.
One of the ways we try to accomplish this task to support the daily efforts of engaging the people, is to have a one day community event. The event is one day, but the planning with the various community stakeholders happens year round. We started doing this in 2017 for that summer event and now as an annual event it is called the Heart 2 Soul Fest.
Heart 2 Soul Fest seeks to engage the Jane Finch and surrounding communities by having a one day outdoor festival full of family-filled activities, sports, motivational speakers, and local musicians/artists. The goal of this event is to help bring the church community in Jane Finch and elsewhere together with the rest of the community members to celebrate all the unique, and great things about the Jane-Finch area. In so doing, God's love can be best expressed to all who participate in the execution and attendance of the event. Jane Finch is a community full of caring people who really help to support each other and this particular reality in the area needs to be highlighted and celebrated.
