From police officers to business owners, Centretown residents rolled up their sleeves for another Centretown Sweep, a community-powered cleanup that aims to help restore pride and energy to Ottawa’s downtown core. The new monthly initiative, organized by the Centretown BIA, brings neighbours, local shops, and outreach groups together to tackle litter and beautify Bank Street. Adam Schaffer, business development coordinator with the Centretown BIA says the goal is to build community connection while keeping the streets cleaner and safer. “It’s really going to incentivize more prideful care, more hands-on care, better care of the streets and its conditions, and realigning with the revitalization of our downtown core,” says Schaffer. “It will actually help boost the functionality of business, of foot traffic and really bringing the community together as a whole.” The effort has drawn wide support from across the neighbourhood, including local businesses such as Soungui Fitness and Wallack’s Art Supplies and Framing. “This is to show people that we care about our community,” says Soungui Koulamallah of Soungui Fitness. “It’s important to keep our community clean, because we want to make sure that other people see that we respect what’s been built here and at the same time it provides us an opportunity to come out, be together and do something good for one another.” For longtime Bank Street shop owner Michael Wallack, keeping the block tidy is part of good business. “The customer journey doesn’t start when somebody enters your store,” he said. “It starts when they get off the bus, park their car, or walk a couple of blocks. We start every morning cleaning the sidewalk and parking lot, we even clean up the shared common space across the street. It makes a huge difference. There’s no one major thing that you can do to make anything better around here. It’s the combination of all these small things that really help at the end of the day.” The Sweep has partnered with Univer, which provides all the cleaning supplies, as well as Operation Come Home, which is offering new opportunities for young people. The program hires and trains local youth to assist with the cleanups and ongoing beautification projects across the neighbourhood. “Our goal is to help young people who might be looking for jobs, who might experience barriers to employment,” says John Heckbert, executive director of Operation Come Home. “We hire our youth, we train them, and we provide them with opportunities to work. A lot of our youth live in Centretown, and to be able to take care of it and have an impact at the street level is also very cool for them.” Among those workers is Zaki Ahmed, who says the experience has been rewarding. “It’s helped me tremendously,” says Ahmed. “And it also makes [Centretown] a better place. I like coming here and I think a lot of people like coming here too. It’s important to make it look nice and have nice character and it helps when you remove all the waste.” The Centretown Sweep is a pilot project which started in August, and organizers say it’s already making a visible difference. The initiative is expected to re-start in the spring.
