Centretown residents may soon be getting some much-needed relief thanks to a $5,000 grant from the Community Foundation of Ottawa to the GottaGo! group, which is campaigning to secure a clean, safe, accessible and open public toilet for Dundonald Park along Somerset Street.
“We’re very grateful to the Community Foundation of Ottawa for the grant,” says GottaGo! chair Joan Kuyek, who notes that the funding will be used to conduct public consultation on the project. “We’re excited and we think there may be a real possibility to get a toilet for the park.”
The campaign, known as Toilets Please for Dundonald Park ؘ– or #TP4DP for short on social media – is a joint project of GottaGo!, the Dundonald Park Working Group and Somerset West Community Health Centre. The grant was a result of a joint application by GottaGo! and the health centre.
Kuyek says the money will be used to hire a part-time community organizer under contract for a negotiable period of time, who will undertake door-to-door organizing to ensure all residents, community groups and businesses around Dundonald Park are contacted, consulted and involved in resolving design, funding and location issues.
“It’s important that the people in the neighbourhood know our side of the idea and have as much input into it as possible,” says Kuyek. Qualified candidates have until Jan. 30 to apply for the position.
Opportunities for community engagement for TP4DP haven’t stopped there. A group of second-year industrial design students at Carleton University is currently working on simple, preliminary concepts as part of a four-week exercise.
“They’re looking at the site and trying to see what they could conceive would be things to think about, how it could look, just to help build a healthy discussion,” says Brian Burns, the contract instructor at Carleton University who is leading the second-year projects class. Burns says he always tries to do projects with the university that engage with the community and create real connections.
Burns notes that the students are only working on preliminary concepts, and their work does not involve any architecture. “It’s just an exercise that will create food for thought that people could look at and talk about, so that they can really see what’s possible.”
Kuyek says she plans to incorporate the students’ concepts into community consultations to help bring images to otherwise abstract ideas. “It’s a vision of what it could maybe be, and we could play with it,” she says.
Somerset Coun. Catherine McKenney says she supports GottaGo!’s initiatives and believes “it’s something that we need to look at seriously.”
“We’ve got an aging population, we’ve got a lot of families with young children, and we’ve got persons with serious mobility issues,” she says. “It is a real barrier to people enjoying our recreation space. If you need to use a washroom there’s nothing available unless you walk back home or go into a coffee shop that has an unlocked bathroom.”
Kuyek explains that the issue hasn’t been addressed by the city because there hasn’t been enough pressure to date to allocate funding to make it happen. There is a possibility that the city can use some of the money from fees collected from developers, says Kuyek, but that would depend on toilets being deemed an expansion of recreational opportunity. “Which up to now, they haven’t considered,” she added.
After a meeting about GottaGo!’s efforts on Jan. 13, Kuyek stated McKenney is “very supportive.” “She’s hoping that they can get the cost issue done through the city and they can start focusing on having it in the budget this year and next,” she said.
“We’ve come a long way in terms of people’s consciousness about public toilets, but that getting transferred into dollars is a whole other question,” says Kuyek.
While there is currently no other source of funding or an estimated cost for the toilet, Kuyek says the grant is a great step in the right direction. “We’re very open to any community input on this,” she says.