DTES Street Market Reports: Street Market Report

It was a surprisingly good day for winter.

The rain magically avoided us despite torrents on Friday and forecast for Monday.

The volunteers did an excellent job as always.

A few adjustments were made in our routine. We now have too many carts to get moved from 62 East Hastings to Pigeon Park in one trip, so we started to take two trips from storage and back. In the morning, the tents now come out first with some of the rest of the equipment, and any one not on the tent crew will go back and get the rest of the table carts.
In the afternoon, at 4pm, the same will happen in reverse order.

As usual, we always give a safety speech before moving any equipment. The carts are heavy and a volunteer could get severely injured if a cart tipped over or ran into them.

The market went great today.

We had a guest non-profit - Vancouver Community Network - come visit the market to collect information for their new "Street Messaging System".

One of our volunteers helped them collect info and phone numbers for their new system, a great compliment to 211 for homeless or people on welfare that need to know about the services.

We also had a great compliment for our new Street WiFi service.
A person came up to the main tent asking to sign up for a Vendor tag ID, and we asked him where he lived. He said: "The Regent". When we asked him if he could see our WiFi signal, he said "yes, and this was the first time I have ever had the internet where I live".

We were quite proud of hearing this, and referred him over to fill out the survey on street messaging.