AHA Media

214th DTES Street Market and 29th Street Market of 2014

Roland Clarke, Coordinator of the DTES Street Market says:

In the heat of the day, we sold a large amount of pop, freezies and popsicles, making this an all time record for Street Market revenue!!!

Operations Upgrade Report

The Greenway Mural project progressed a little bit with the addition of a few more tarps. We now have 5 tarps hanging along the edge of Carrall St. in order to keep the shoppers inside the market and make for a clearer greenway.

We signed up another 30 vendors throughout the day. We now have over 80 vendor tags created and about half that many have been distributed to the vendors. They wear them proudly. We hope that this will enable us to keep track of who is not a resident of the DTES, and who should not be selling at our market.

We wanted to have a test run of independent security, but the guy that we hired for the day was stuck in Mission with a broken down car.

We found a local person, Ken, who has a BST certification that needs to be renewed. We used this as an opportunity to test out how a security guard would work and how they would interact with the RPICs.

Freezer cart was a great hit. This contributed to a record day in pop/popsicle sales.
This was a purpose built cart using our Great Beginnings money. Thank you, City of Vancouver!

213th DTES Street Market and 28th Street Market of 2014

Roland Clarke, Coordinator of the DTES Street Market says:
It was on and off spotty with rain today.

This kept the market calm, but made it a little more unpleasant for the volunteers during the day.

There were a number of great things to talk about that were made possible at the market by the Great Beginnings grant from the City of Vancouver.

First, We made our first vendor ID tags. The system arrived on Friday, and that gave us a couple of hours to play with the system, set up the database, and create a vendor tag template. Here is an example of a vendor ID tag.

After 6-8 weeks or so, we should have a large enough penetration among our regular vendors to start demanding that vendors where tags, and to start kicking out vendors that do not have tags.

We had a vendor meeting, where we introduced a number of the upgrades to a little over 40 vendors – with widespread support. Tanya Fink from the planning department attended the meeting as well.

We introduced the concept of ID badges, the Greenway Mural, and the private security guards. Most vendors were quite supportive of the fact that we will have better security at the market.

After the vendor meeting, we accepted about 30 membership forms, and processed a little more than 20 badges to hand out on Sunday. All the vendors that got their badges were extremely happy and proud. The market is a big source of pride in the Downtown Eastside.

At the market, we started hanging tarps along the east side of Carrall St. in order to simulate the Greenway Mural, before the canvas hangings are ready. This Sunday, we hung 3 tarps. Next week, we will hang 5-6, and so on until the tarps are hanging the entire length of Carrall St.

We also began increasing the number of early morning clean up staff. This way we can have an impact on the early vendors. As the percentage of ID tags increases, we can also start to crack down on vendors that come too early in the morning.