Lack of funding forces decision by organizers

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The founder of Malvern's Celebrate Us! community festival says she's forced to announce its cancellation this year, at a time when the neighbourhood needs it as much as ever.

For the past four years the free event, always on the first Saturday of the school year, has been "like Christmas in September" in Wickson Trail Park, Elma Gabriel said.

But next Saturday "that park is going to be a dreary place," Gabriel announced this week, because though Celebrate Us! kept growing year after year, its funding didn't and it proved too much for a small group of volunteers to handle.

Though done on what Gabriel called a shoestring budget of $10,000, the event last year attracted more than 2,000 people who came to enter a spelling bee or dance contest, win some books, or get to know police in a friendly setting.

Gabriel had hoped for more government support for the event.

At a meeting in June, she told area MPPs that government funds were not "getting to the trenches" and warned the festival might fold without a financial boost.

But what worries her most, she said, is Celebrate Us! started as a response to gun violence in the community, which this week found another young man, 19-year-old Caxtons Kyeremeh, dead of a gunshot wound.

"We are trying to lead by example" by exhibiting the best of the community and "love for one another," she said.

Gabriel added, however, that she has asked a consultant to draw up a plan to revive the festival next year.

"We are not looking at this as the end."

Celebrate Us! was able to present a $1,000 scholarship, a gift from the Apple Creek Adventist Church, to D'andrade Browne, who arrived in Malvern last year as part of an immigrant family from Trinidad and Tobago.

Though he described his life in an essay for the group as "a roller coaster of emotions," the youth is set to study this fall in Oshawa and plans to be an engineer.

In an interview, Browne said he can't see why Malvern has a bad reputation. Very few of the residents there are involved in gangs, he said.

"I know people from Malvern. They are aspiring people," who do their best to go to university or to get the jobs they want, Browne added this week.