Bringing Together an Entire Community to Sustain Lindy Hop in Canada

As I continue to shape this idea, I am using the knowledge of Strategic Planning through the Project Management Program (PMP) guidelines and recommendations. The start of any project does include a team who monitors the "Key Performance Indicators" and wave yellow or red flags when necessary. So the first step is to identify stake holders with this draft communique. I'm going to need resources to gather all this input when it starts to come in, ensuring inclusion and diversity to create an innovative solution for the challenges we all face.

Although Lindy Hop is an internationally recognized and practiced dance form world wide. Flowing throughout the east and west coast of Canada are pockets of swing dance communities, each community serves as both a life source and community hub for much of this inspiring African-American Folk dance with a rich history in jazz music.

While many organizations and social groups do great work to tackle projects that preserve and protect the art, no single agency or all-inclusive plan exists to create a conduit of awareness of each other, and for discussions to take place, or share resources to drive the entire ecosystem upwards to becoming abundant and self sustaining.

Community leaders, dance instructors, studio owners, swing dance community enthusiasts, jazz musicians, DJs and other partners are uniting to create a comprehensive best practices and guidelines for the Canadian ecosystem. This is a big task, so we are starting in to get together and work through small and tiny chunks at a time.

First phase of the project focuses on identifying everyone and ensuring they know what we are doing. It’s the first all-encompassing plan in Canadian Lindy Hop history.

I am asking for your help to collect, gather, and analyze who these people are and take their input to create viable goals. The people and the communities they all live in is the life source for any scene to even exist, not to mention dance, convene and be inclusive. To ensure everyone’s voices are  heard, I am creating a Stake holder's List so we can collect and analyze your input from all the scenes in Canada, and anyone generally interested. So the plan could represent the country's holistic and cultural view.

By the community, for the community: From awareness, to conversations and innovation, the community’s input will be used to create a plan that ultimately affects the eco system operating back through each scene. The hope is that the plan is built on feedback from all the community members as time and effort exists.