Welcome to Nepeanville!
Hello neighbours!
Nepeanville is a space where we’ll stay actively curious about the stuff that’s working in our local communities. All around us there are humans and groups who are taking steps to address challenges in small and less-small ways.
They may not be succeeding just yet. And their efforts may not be perfect. (So dull!) But by looking at our community’s fixers, our try-harders and our hope-focussed folks, we’ll stay on the side of…possibilities.
In doing this, we’ll - fingers crossed - feel more hopeful about our west-end Ottawa spaces and the wide-world beyond. We may even feel a little tug to try out a little solution-finding ourselves.
Because, as we all know, our greater news-feeds can be grim spaces these days. And Nepeanville, a non-island, is obviously connected to the broader challenges provincially, nationally and internationally.
If any world-weariness or cynicism has crept into your life lately - wait: just me? - the hope is that being reminded about the constructive solutions local humans are trying will be a cheering balm.
Your tour guide
I live here in Nepean. I grew up in this beautiful, growing and flawed-as-anywhere suburban-urban zone. I teach journalism at Algonquin College, parent my kids here and walk my goofy yellow Lab all over our streets. I love learning about our west-end Ottawa regions and the communities beyond our borders.
I’m also wired to be an optimist. Which can be, at times, annoying. Or seen to be naive. (And is surely a coping mechanism. ;)
But join me on the bright side? Let’s go fuel up on some local, hopeful stories.
(If this doesn’t work, I can recommend some less-nourishing-but-super-cheering poetry and baby beaver accounts.)
I know you’ll have some excellent solution-trying efforts to share too. I look forward to chatting.
Where and what is Nepeanville?
For our purposes, Nepeanville includes the communities that once made up the old City of Nepean - and a few neighbouring ones too. Like our greater Ottawa region, it’s also the traditional, unceded territory of the Algonquin Anishinaabeg People. Today, Nepeanville is a place where curious, community-focused and hope-seeking people live, work, visit and play.
Whether you live in this outer-urban/suburban area of coverage - or beyond it - our newsletter will be a kitchen party: I’ll provide the space, the stories will come from us all.
An important historical note: “Nepeanville” was once a proposed community in what’s now the Experimental Farm zone, inside of Nepean Township. It only ever existed on paper. It never came to be. (If you’ve not yet done so, get yourself to Bruce S. Elliott’s The City Beyond: the history of Nepean, birthplace of Canada’s capital, 1792-1990. The library has nine copies to share.)
Our Nepeanville, however, is very real.
