Homefest 2010

Homefest is an annual event presented by the Edmonton Coalition on Housing and Homelessness featuring music, poetry, art, and speakers to raise funds for and awareness of homelessness and housing issues. This year's event featured a fun and interactive children's area with storytelling, crafts, and clowns, as well as panels speaking about the experiences of homelessness from a variety of perspectives.

This year's art exhibit was expanded and included visual art (particularly photography, paintings, and mixed-media) that dealt with different aspects of housing issues. Photos from the late Leonard Martial were there (he was homeless and documented the streets), work from inner city youths and adults, and even a few of my pieces that were featured in Edmonton's Food Bank's Expressions of Hunger earlier this year.

As for music, a number of Edmonton's best folk and roots artists performed on three stages. The performance that stood out the most for me (and for others, as I gleaned afterwards from discussions) was "One Room," which featured singer/songwriters Bob Jahrig, Jessica Heine, Maria Dunn, and Joe Nolan performing songs they wrote to narrate photos taken 25 years ago by Sharon Nolan. Nolan photographed elderly residents of a downtown rooming house.

This was my first year attending Homefest, and I thought the connection between art/music and working on solving an important social issue was important. Here are my photos from Homefest.

Distribution Day

Distribution is the most physical process of producing the paper. Sorting, bagging, and delivering the papers to our carriers often leaves me exhausted, and sometimes with a few cuts and bruises. Colleen and I delivered yesterday in the beautiful sunshine, which lasted just long enough for us to finish. Then, the skies opened up and it started to pour. I pulled the last few stacks of papers from the back of Colleen's car and ran down with them into the office, narrowly avoiding them getting wrecked by moisture. So far, I have only heard from one carrier whose papers got soaked and am likely going to have to do another distribution run this week.

The best part about doing distribution on a sunny, warm weekend is that we get to run into a lot of people. Some of our carriers were outside or saw me coming up to their doors, and came outside to chat for a bit. When we got to John & Kim's, we got invited to watch the cob fence building workshop that was in progress. A cob fence is an ancient, environmentally sustainable way of building, using clay mixed with straw. People were dancing around in the wet clay, getting it to the right consistency before balling it up and adding it to the growing fence. I took some pictures for the September issue.

We stopped for lunch at a new restaurant in Chinatown, Longan. It is a family business, and our servers were some of the younger family members. Service was very friendly, and the food was impressive. Look for a review in the September issue.

I hid out in the office during the storm, then came back up when the sun returned. I had to go for a walk to take some pictures of the incredible flowers blooming in the gardens and alleys of McCauley, in particular Caroline's front yard (I have never seen so many colourful flowers before on a private property) and Tim's flowerboxes that were very simple, but had excellent composition in terms of the arrangements.