Tuesday 14 April 2015

Greymouth Summer Street "Fare": February 2015


Just Jazz performing at the Greymouth Rotary Summer Street Fare

Rotarians and a Rotarian partner at work, Centre Gary Hopkinson, onion man Dave McMillan plus Chris Stoop—husband of a Rotarian


The Greymouth District Council, in the South Island of New Zealand, is going through an urban redevelopment programme and has been engaging with the community through an extensive consultative process.

Several members of Greymouth Rotary have experienced summer fetes, in Southern France, that  bring together visitors and locals with food stalls, music and local fare. Typically a town square is closed off and tables and chairs are provided for the community who can purchase food and drinks from food stalls and enjoy eating whilst listening to local musicians.

Greymouth Rotary partnered with the community and  closed off a street in the centre of town, recruited 12 food stalls,7 art and craft stalls and organised professional musicians to entertain.

The event was an outstanding success. It may become a regular feature on the Greymouth calendar.

According to Council's economic development coordinator 'The event was a fantastic, vibrant and community building event. I have had lots of positive feedback and thoroughly enjoyed it myself.'

This was a community building project rather than a fund raiser and club members used their Rotary networking skills to generate a most successful 'Fare'.

Rotary and Lions combined to run a food stall to promote one of our local food products and thus generated a modest donation to our local Air Rescue Trust. 200 venison burgers and many plates of gourmet sausage tasting samples were sold in just two hours.

Thanks  to the support of the community and the registered stall holders the Rotary Club of Greymouth was  able to run the event on a modest budget.