For the past four years, the Center City Committee (CCC) has participated as a sponsor in the annual Newcomer’s Night, usually held in September. The idea is to welcome new residents and businesses to downtown with a block party in the Enterprise Bank parking lot on Middle Street. Besides food, drink and entertainment, there are tables manned by various organizations with information about things to do or see in Lowell, restaurants and businesses to visit, and general information about the community.
Newcomer’s Night is coordinated by a volunteer committee that includes COOL, The City of Lowell DPD, Merrimack Valley CVB, the National Park, the DLBA, and Enterprise Bank as well as the CCC and has generally been held in September but may be pushed out to October this year. New residents are targeted by flyers and some direct mail.
The CCC has been exploring ways to make this kind of information available on an on-going basis to folks as they move in, and to keep the information up to date and available. One solution that has proven difficult to sustain, is to provide flyers, brochures, business coupons and other materials to the various residences. It is difficult to sustain because the CCC, like many other organizations in Lowell, is entirely made up of volunteers and has no staff to coordinate the updating and distribution of the materials.
There are existing websites with a lot of the information already out there but, like the long-wished-for-but-never-realized central events calendar, getting everything in one place and kept up to date would take at least a full-time job and maybe more. Nevertheless, one of the CCC’s work plan tasks is to find simple and effective ways to better inform new residents about what is available in downtown Lowell. Any suggestions would be welcomed.
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