Students show vision for Village Green

With construction paused at the Village Green site there was concern within the Creemore Community Foundation that the project had lost visibility, said member Bill Mann, who began looking for ways to build enthusiasm through the winter and spring.
Mann was tasked with coming up with outreach projects, in consultation with others in the community.
“One of the things we concluded was that people who were going to have the most use of the Village Green over time will be the folks who are currently children and we really hadn’t, as an organization, involved younger folks in any of the deliberations around the Village Green,” said Mann.
Hoping to tap into the imaginations of local children, an invitation went out to Nottawasaga and Creemore Public School (NCPS) to participate in an art project challenging them to create a drawing or piece of artwork showing how they might use the park or what they would like to see and do there.
“I enthusiastically agree that this would be a great initiative our school would enjoy being involved in and I presented it to the staff and student body as a school-wide art project for the month of February,” said NCPS principal Mark McCain… “I was immediately met with curiosity and excitement. Our students were very excited to create something that reminded the community that we were still here and working hard during this unusual time.”
With the whole school on board, 240 individual drawings were completed to form parts of a large installation.
Each student was supplied an eight-by-eight inch piece of paper which, once completed, were then scanned and printed on weather resistant material and have since been artfully installed on the hoarding around the construction site by James Bruer, Liz Eakins and their son Gray. The work is arranged in class groupings to spell out ‘Creemore.’
Examples of the artwork have been posted on the NCPS Facebook, Instagram and Twitter pages and McCain said the feedback has been extremely positive.
Mann said he is encouraged by the excitement about the project, as it hopefully indicated that the goal of engaging both youth and their parents has been achieved.
“The result was worth all the effort that was put into it,” said Mann.
The pandemic has delayed construction of the new park space, mainly due to delivery of goods and services, said Creemore Community Foundation member Stuart Lazier.
He said everything is going well but it is taking longer and therefore timelines have changed, and costs are higher. The park will not be done in time for summer, but hopefully by late August or early September, said Lazier, which means that Christmas is the earliest there may be planned events in the space and that the grand opening is pushed back to spring.