An Opportunity, a Challenge and a glass of wine…

My name is Sharon Townsend and I am the Executive Director of the South Granville Business Improvement Association and the co-creator of FlagWalk. Over the next few days I thought it might be of interest how FlagWalk came about and what we are learning as FlagWalk comes to life.



The opportunity – 6 billion eyes, 300,000 spectators, and a once in a lifetime opportunity to showcase a great city. For well over 2 years we have been searching for ways to welcome the world. South Granville is on the fringe of the downtown Olympic bubble. Close enough to be impacted but not necessarily close enough to benefit from the thousands of spectators that will be milling about before and after events looking for a place to eat or to pick up that fabulous memory of their Vancouver visit. How do we entice folks across that bridge; how do we encourage our regular customers to shop; and how do we celebrate the Olympics without infringing on the Olympic brand!

We would plan something only to discover that our ideas made the Ring Police twitchy and we would be forced back to the drawing board to try again. It actually got to the point where we were so frustrated that we were simply going to do nothing. Nuts to it all!

Enter the glass of wine and a friend. I meet regularly with my Yaletown Business Association colleague, Annette O’Shea to brainstorm, laugh and complain about various aspects of our respective jobs. This particular meeting was devoted to ranting about VANOC and how impossible they were making it for folks like us to tie in to the Olympic celebrations without getting our hands slapped. By now Annette was all too familiar with my geographical challenge. Yaletown was facing the opposite challenge. How do you conduct some semblance of ‘business as usual’ when you are smack in the middle of Olympic Ground Zero with road closures and security zones! We also shared a concern that November thru February could be boom or bust for retail depending on who you talked to. Salt Lake City had warned us years in advance that shoppers were prone to stay home to avoid the perceived chaos and that was simply something we could not allow to happen in our respective communities.

I must confess that I laughed out loud and cheered when I saw the article about Lululemon and their non-Olympic merchandise. We had the identical conversation – often in fits of hysterical laughter about what was in... what was out... and what might land us in Olympic jail.

By the time the first glass of wine was done we had determined to work together and focus on the pre-Olympic period to ensure our merchants survive the upheaval. By the second glass of wine we had a plan exploding in our heads with far too many crazy directions we could take the idea of Flags and wayfinding.



At the end of the day, it came down to this... forget the hype, forget the rings forget the commercial aspects of the Olympics. We were going to follow our guts and do what was important to each of us personally which was to celebrate national pride, friendship, world peace, inclusiveness, equality, and have fun while we were at it. The IOC did not have a trademark on national pride or friendship. A phrase was at the top of one of our planning pages “a world of friends is a world of peace”. FlagWalk was born and the tagline is still with us.