Local resident Lana Stewart is looking for public input about what should be advertised on signs she is making to show the distance on foot and bike to places of interest in Ottawa.
Having lived car free for 13 years, Stewart first saw the signs on the Walk (Your City) website which she says she had been following for a while. She then decided to apply for funding from local businesses to allow her to make them in her city too.
After filling out what she describes as an “easy form,” Stewart was awarded $1,000 from the Ottawa branch of the Awesome Foundation, to help her fulfill her goal.
“(Ottawa) is not boring if you know where to go. It has a boring reputation where people think all you can do is go to the museum, Parliament and restaurants. But there is a whole other side to Ottawa which locals know about but isn’t advertised so much in the tourist industry,” she says.
Stewart says she is looking into raising more money for her signs from local groups because she wants them to be spread across Ottawa.
“Hopefully, it won’t be just a downtown project. I want to show our other local attractions across the city,” she says.
Stewart says she wants to hear from Ottawa residents about what they would like to see advertised on the signs and that she wants to promote local businesses that don’t already have, or can’t afford marketing.
Avi Caplan, a trustee of Awesome Ottawa, says the group of trustees met and chose Stewart’s idea, “because it was awesome! Not that the other possibilities weren’t too. But we particularly liked Lana’s. We obviously disagree about Ottawa being the most boring city in Canada. There’s a lot going on in Ottawa. You just have to look for it.”
Awesome Ottawa has given 41 awards – $41,000 – since starting up in 2010. The money for the awards comes from the pockets of individual trustees, usually there are 10 per branch of the foundation, and every month they contribute $100 each which creates the $1,000 monthly award. Awesome Ottawa was the first chapter of the Awesome Foundation in Canada, and the fourth chapter globally.
Caplan says that many of the projects the foundation has supported in Ottawa have been very successful.
Stewart hopes to have the signs finished by the end of April next year and put up around Ottawa in early May.
Walk Raleigh began in January last year in the city of Raleigh, North Carolina, as a way of encouraging people to walk or cycle places through signs to local attractions.
Pioneered by Matt Tomasulo and a small group of friends he calls “fellow guerrillas,” signs which mimicked those on highways were put up around the city at night, telling people how far by foot or bike it was to places of local interest.
When the press got hold of the idea, demand increased globally for the signs so Tomasulo decided to make a website called Walk (Your City) that enabled other people to copy the design and put up signs in their city too.
Walk (Your City) has now spread across six continents, 14 countries around the world with over 1,500 signs created.