KBIA Ambassador: Week 7 in Review

Week 7

As I approach the end of my tenure with the Kleinburg BIA, week seven of my time here has come to an end and, like usual, I have quite a bit to talk about this week.

Let’s start with this darn weather. Being that this job requires me to be outside so much, the aggressively hot temperatures this week had a great impact on my work these last five days.

As I picked weeds, swept around town and even as I just walked around talking to people in the area, the heat outside made my job a lot harder. As I mentioned last week, being out in the weather that we experienced this week – coupled with my habit of forgetting to drink water while working – made this week a very hard one for me physically. Pulling weeds in particular was a very physically tiring activity, but all of these tasks brought with them a near insurmountable level of back and leg pain that made my five days of work feel like fifteen. At times, the heat was so bad that I even had to leak into nearby stores to cool down for a few minutes at a time, because the heat got so hard to handle.

Next, as my week continued past the gardening and beautification responsibilities that I have discussed these last few weeks, I also had to continue collecting the surveys that I had distributed to the businesses around downtown Kleinburg – a task that proved to have its fair share of bumps along the way.

After collecting and inputting the data from a good portion of the businesses in the area, I still had a few to collect but these last group of businesses always had a reason that their surveys were not filled out. Going back about two weeks now, I made a point to tell each and every business that the survey is obviously not a requirement but these particular businesses decided to take a copy anyways and assure me that they would fill out what they could. Accordingly, throughout the week, I would go to these businesses to ask if the surveys were done and they would tell me to come back later. While I understand that the surveys (beyond being optional) are also not these organizations’ first priority, I struggled to understand why they would keep insisting that the survey would be done without actually completing it. All in all, I started this week with four more surveys to collect and I am ending this week, still, with four surveys to collect. It’s not that the surveys were a necessity but I feel like the surveys asked some pretty good questions that the BIA could use to better serve the community and its businesses so its disappointing to see that these few businesses aren’t taking advantage of the opportunity to express their thoughts and concerns to the BIA. Being that next week is my last and there is an event all of next weekend (both Saturday and Sunday), I don’t know if I’ll end up ever receiving the surveys from these last few places but it was something I wanted to bring up in this week’s post because this was one of the few negative aspects of my experience as a summer student here thus far.

I sincerely hope that nothing like this happens next week as I’d like to end my experience here on a completely positive note but I also know that with any task I do there are bound to be some speed bumps along the way and I am appreciative of all of these challenges because they serve as great learning experiences for me, at the very least.

Regardless, as I look towards my eighth and final week with the BIA, I realize that this experience has been a great learning opportunity that has provided a lot of value for me. That said, I do need to save some content for next week’s final post but I look forward to using next week’s blog as time to reflect on what has been an amazing eight week position with a great organization.

Until next week,

Vimal Sivakumar