News from the Kevin MacKay, Executive Director of the Sky Dragon:

Greetings!

It has been a few months since our last official update, and there is much to relate  since the Sky Dragon Coop first experienced an acute financial crisis in March.  Today I’m very relieved to say the situation is better than we could have hoped for, and the Coop is engaged in an inspiring renaissance and revitalization.

The major challenge facing the Coop in March was the Teacher’s Credit Union pulling out as first mortgage holders.  This necessitated the Coop finding alternative financing at very short notice, and prompted a community-wide call-out for support.  Thankfully, the community responded with vigor, and suggestions for financing, donations and community bonds came flooding in.  In the midst of all of the offers of help, one
particularly incredible offer stood out, and we’re excited to officially announce Sky Dragon’s new mortgage-holder – Lidster Financial Services.

Read the rest of this entry »

Special thanks to Dan Haartman who did an amazing job re-enforcing the patio fence last Sunday. The fence was really showing it’s age, practically falling apart in places. So he welded some metal bar across the top as a railing to hold the whole fence together.

The new railing still needs to be painted, and some work still needs to be done to better anchor the posts. But on the whole a lot better than it was.

The Sky Dragon held an informational meeting last Tuesday for potential members of the new interim board which will take over operations from the current board in a couple of weeks time. The interim board  will be short-lived (just over 1 year) and is tasked with restructuring the co-op in order to make it more sustainable and connected with the community.

We are guessing the new board will be between 12-15 people with various committees to carve off, analyze and act on specific issues regarding the centre. Ideally, each committee will have one or two board members who can act as a connection to the rest of the board. This probably sounds pretty vague, but much of the details will be filled in by the interim board, so we don’t yet know exactly what the new system will look like.

The nominees have until mid July to accept the position and when that happens we will post some more details.

Well folks, the blog is back from a short downtime earlier today. We’ve finished migrating the website over to our new webhost Canvas Dreams. The next step is to move over the various @skydragon.org email addresses and we’ll finally be done with our old host. The long-term plan is to do a complete overhaul of the website, as sadly it has been neglected for some time. At some point during that process, this blog will be re-purposed to a general Sky Dragon news blog as we move out of “Save the Dragon” crisis mode and start restructuring and rebuilding the co-op.

Although there hasn’t been official word yet about the new financial arrangement, though there were hints in the last email Kevin sent out, people are generally feeling like the Sky Dragon is on much more solid ground. We are more or less Stay tuned (soon, hopefully) for more news about the restructuring and the website redesign.

Shortly, the Sky Dragon website will be moving to a new webhost. We’re currently with Netfirms, and the hosting package is somewhat limited in what we can actually do. So within the next week we will be moving to CanvasDreams, a great host with an eco-friendly business model, and a lot more hosting options. We’re very much looking forward to:

• Lots more @skydragon.org email addresses to use (currently limited to 10 addresses – bleh)
• Proper mailing lists for the various sub-organizations in the centre
• Subdomains for setting up independently maintained mini-websites
• More server-side scripting options for setting up a volunteer database and more

The change should be more or less seamless. Our website address will stay the same (skydragon.org) and existing email addresses will stay the same. Basically, if all goes well you won’t notice the difference, though there may be a short interruption in accessing the website and email.

Visually, the website on the new host will look exactly the same, but the hope is that further down the road we can better leverage the features offered by our new webhost.

I’ve posted the official document on how to gain a Sky Dragon Membership. At all levels the membership gets you a nifty membership card, a %10 discount, voting rights and the opportunity to run as a Community Representative with a seat on the Co-op board. Other levels have their own benefits, so checkout the membership how-to page for more details.

We’ve been getting a lot more feedback from the community at large and that’s something we are truly grateful for. Keep it up! I’ve posted a bunch of the comments to the Community page. We’re especially interested in hearing about your experiences at the Sky Dragon, what you like, dislike and what you would like to see changed. So please keep those comments coming in!

A message from the Board circulated via email the other night…

*     *     *

I hope this message finds everyone well and enjoying the glorious spring weather. I have to apologize for the lateness of this update, and want to thank our friends and supporters for their patience over the past few months. Since the last update lots has transpired, and there’s much to relate.

Since we went public with our financial crisis in Mid March, the Coop has been focused on three priorities: securing the financing needed to replace the Teacher’s Credit Union mortgage, fundraising to cover immediate costs and to reduce debt, and planning for a full organizational restructure.

But First, the Festivals…

Before we could engage these priorities, we first had to deal with two big events – the Halton Eco-Fest on April 17 and 18 and the fourth annual Mayday Festival on May 1st. The Bread and Roses Café was the sole food provider at the Eco-Fest, and had to set up and staff an off-site café for two days. This proved to be a huge logistical hurdle, and stretched the small B&R kitchen to capacity. With the help of amazing volunteers and staff (Mark, Jeff, Simon, Natalie, Angela, Holly, Kathryn, Sue, Marg Ann, Mike, Beth, Lisa – you all rock!), the Coop pulled off the event in fine style. Feedback from festival vendors and participants was very positive, and this looks to be a yearly possibility for the Coop.

(click through to read the whole message)

Read the rest of this entry »

Thanks to everyone who made last weeks Art Crawl at 228 James St a huge success. Special thanks to Mike Pattison who was absolutely key  in pulling everything together, and thanks to the many artists who filled the space with so many amazing works. This is part of an ongoing effort to better connect the Sky Dragon with the James St neighbourhood and hopefully we can build relationships with the businesses and people there.

Thanks again everyone!

A major thank-you to everyone who came out to support the Mayday Festival. To those who performed, to those who volunteered their time, to the organizations in attendance, and to those staffers who worked long shifts: Thank you! A special thanks to the Steelworkers and the other labor groups that came out and we look forward to working together – and celebrating together – in future.

The Steelworkers march, featuring a debut by Mr Moneybags, made it into The Hamilton Spectator.

Here is a random sampling of photos from the event. If anyone has Mayday images posted online I would gladly link to them from here.

Click through for more photos…

Read the rest of this entry »