The City of Williams Lake has partnered with the Canadian Centre for Safer Communities to review its Community Well-being and Safety plan.
They developed an online survey for residents to take that can be found on the City’s website that
Well Being and Safety Plan Coordinator Silvia Dubray said your feedback will help guide local actions to improve safety, well-being and quality of life across the Cariboo-Chilcotin.
“We don’t often get a chance to have a voice or to say where we find things to be uncomfortable or not safe and where we do find things to be safe. The survey is a very easy way, 15 minutes of your time, to let us know how you feel around safety, around well-being, around mental health. It allows us to hear from you so we know what are the gaps, what are the challenges, and what are we doing right in our community right now.”
Dubray said from the survey’s feedback they are hoping to build a new well-being and safety plan that could give us an outlook for the next 3 to 5 years.
“There are so many amazing organizations and agencies in our community that are collaborating to help Williams Lake work safely but we need to know what to collaborate on and what to focus on in the next few years. What do the citizens feel are the things that concern them the most and what are the things we are already doing successfully.”
As part of being the Well-Being and Safety Plan Coordinator, Dubray has to report to a system leadership group.
“RCMP, Mayor and Council, Denisiqi Service Society, Interior Health, Child Development Centre, Foundry, Canadian Mental Health, and School District 27. We also have 2 supportive members from the Canadian Centre for Safer Communities which is a nationally funded Centre to help communities be safer.”
Dubray noted that she is hoping to have 300-plus completed survey’s by the time it ends on April 28 so that she’ll have a better cross stream of information to create this new well-being and safety plan.
“The next steps would be to summarize all that information to find out where we are sitting in the health, the wellness, and the safety zones and then present that to the system leadership group. They will decide what their organization has the capacity to help with. For example, RCMP might help with doing some environmental safety, where could we use more lighting. Interior Health might help with what are some mental health programs we need in our community that we don’t have right now.”
Dubray noted that when you take the survey and you see a question you don’t like, you don’t have to answer it to continue the survey, you can just skip past it and give us the answers to the questions that are important to you.
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