The ice is coming off the rinks, the ski trails are slowly fading away and grass is starting to poke up in the community center sport fields. Spring is in the air and we’re turning the page on another busy winter at Riverview Community Centre.

Maybe you were part of Breakfast with Santa, the Frost Bite River Run, our Winter Carnival, or the Grey Hares or 4 on 4 Hockey Tournaments. If you were participating, volunteering or watching games or the runners you would have witnessed first-hand how busy our little club was these last few months.

While an active community centre is a real benefit to our neighbourhood but it points to the pressing need for us to get started on the next phase of our renovations. We need more space to host all these great programs.

The good news on that front is that we have confirmed $100,000 in funding from the City of Winnipeg and funding from the General Council of Winnipeg Community Centres. We are still actively looking for the remainder of funds required for the project with a view to be started this spring.

As we pursue these renovations we are also looking at some updates to our Community Centre’s Constitution. A recent review of the Constitution suggested that our board structure isn’t currently aligned to the roles prescribed in the document. More importantly, several of the board roles identified in the Constitution are inconsistent with the programing, operations and governance needs of the community centre.

With that in mind, we will be introducing a number of changes to the Constitution for you (our community centre members) to vote on at our AGM on April 20. The proposed changes will be made available for review in mid-March on riverviewcc.ca. I hope you will take the time to review them and then attend the AGM to discuss and vote on these amendments.

We will also be looking to add a number of new members to the board to fill several different roles. If you are interested in contributing time and energy to build a stronger community centre, please contact me at D.E.Cunningham@shaw.ca. I would be happy to provide more information about our board needs to you.

Speaking of the board, I’d like to thank Casey Leonard for the time he spent on our board. Casey resigned from the board in January. I’ll miss his ideas and energy. He was a very positive contributor to our efforts to keep programming and events exciting and fun.

Finally, I hope you will join me in congratulating club GM, Charles, and his wife, Laura, on the birth of their baby boy, Theodore, on January 28. All reports point to a very healthy baby and two pretty exhausted new parents. It’s so nice to see our community centre family grow like this.