Our 2020 Community Project

Each year, Orange City Life likes to set ourselves a Community Project. Over the last few years our Community Projects have enabled a well to be put down in a community in Zimbabwe where the locals previously had to travel 5kms just to access drinking water, also we donated several thousand dollars to a school called the Miracle School in Pakistan, this school helps care for and educate children who are forced to work as slaves in brick kilns.

This year our Community Project has been closer to home and we called it Put Orange First. Our aims were to support and encourage local small business owners, particularly retailers, encourage locals to want to shop and do business with local businesses before going elsewhere, and to generally help us all to appreciate what we have here in Orange and to support and look after it. This project has seen a lot of progress be made during the year, but any real benefits may not be seen for some time yet. One outcome we achieved was a group called Put Orange First was established early in the year and this group has been meeting and working every week throughout 2019 to try and get a few things happening. The enthusiasm among this group has been amazing but they’ve found the things they wanted to do didn’t happen as quickly as they would have liked. The group established very clear goals right from the beginning and is committed to seeing them through, so Put Orange First will continue to meet throughout 2020 and keep working on the various projects they have on their agenda.

For 2020, I’ve decided to again stay closer to home and make our Community Project a local one. We’ll call it “Local Media is Best”.

I’m of the opinion that our local media has a major role to play in the way our community functions and the way we all feel about things generally. Those who read my comments regularly will be well aware that I’ve thought for some time that many of our local media outlets are now letting us down very badly in certain areas. I won’t go into that here, but I will say that in keeping with our mission statement of bringing out the best in people, we’ll be focussing on how our media serves us throughout 2020, and of course what we do here at Orange City Life will be part of that. I believe that if our local media has our City’s best interests at heart, they’d report and do things a bit differently. By differently, I don’t necessarily mean they shouldn’t report news accurately and truthfully, but rather that they should report news fairly and in a more balanced way so as not to simply stir people up with clever words, headlines etc. It’s not what they say, it’s the way they say it that sometimes that concerns me.

Of course, that’s only part of it, another objective follows on a bit from last year’s project Put Orange First. Here in Orange there are several genuinely local media outlets like Orange City Life, and we’ll be telling our readers more about them and why we should all support them more, as well.

So that’s our Community Project for 2020, time will tell how well it goes.