New Facebook group for change

Photo: Contributed

The three founders of new Facebook group

Time For Change Penticton is no more, and now there is a new Facebook group focused on bringing change to the city.

The three founders of Educate Encourage Empower #Penticton -- Crystal Olson, 36, Marissa McPherson, 30, and Tracy Van Raes, 36 -- envision getting younger people more involved in their community.

“Our generation’s family demographics are different," said Olson. "We are  working minimum wage jobs, a lot of dads are working out of town so they are absent, and there are lots of single mothers as well. We want a city council that understands our needs and works with us to build a prosperous city, and give Penticton more life with festivals and jobs and innovation driven by young people and those that want real change.”

The founders further state that statistics show only about 30 per cent of eligible voters actually make it to the polls for municipal elections, and only a very small minority of those are under the age of 30.

The creators of the new group said they also had issues with the direction Time For Change was going.

"It became apparent recently that one of the early supporters saw an opportunity with our ideas, but had a different end-goal vision that we were initially naïve to. While some of the members were being censored or being asked not to comment, we felt we saw evidence that a handful of people were making plans to do more sophisticated politicking and run a slate of pre-vetted candidates to make a clean sweep of City Hall under the name Vision Penticton. But instead of being separate, to continue to use Time For Change. We didn’t agree with that," said Olson. "We believe, as our page is titled, that we can Educate Encourage and Empower Penticton -- not tell people who they should vote for.” 

"We want our new page to be welcoming and cooperating with an input of new ideas and to pull together as a community and to encourage younger citizens to become involved," she added. "We hope this fresh start will re-energize the original vision and get people excited about the elections."

It is all about Educating Encouraging and Empowering Penticton to be better. We are extremely grateful that our new page has already over 700 members and has only been up for 48 hours."

Olson and McPherson were originally motivated to change the stereotypes of youth when a city councillor referred to Boonstock attendees as “headbanging druggies,” a comment that Councillor Katie Robinson has since apologized for.

The supporter, mentioned above, said she chose to take down the page, (Time For Change), because various founders of the group had a separate vision.