The days where you could walk over to your neighbor’s front door and ask for a cup of sugar often feel like they are long gone. Many homeowners stick to themselves, only waving or nodding hello to those familiar faces when they pass by. One way to stop feeling like you’re living beside complete strangers is to organize a party for the entire neighborhood, where everyone can invite their families, their friends and even their dogs to mingle.
IMAGE: PIXABAY
Step One – Get All Of The Legal Stuff Out Of The Way
After picking a date for your block party, you need to start your event-planning by dealing with legal matters. Anyone who lives in the city needs to apply for a street event permit to partially or fully close off the area from vehicular traffic — for boulevards and local roads, you will need to advise the city of Toronto at least eight weeks before the big day.
Depending on how grand your plans are, you may need to seek out building permits, insurance, noise by-law exemptions, public health regulations and liquor licenses. If you are worried about the costs piling up, you can make sure that the party pays for itself by asking neighbors to purchase admission tickets or by hosting raffles with donated prizes.
Step Two – Hire A Food Truck
You will need to think about having hot food and cold drinks available for the party because people will not stick around for more than an hour if they are hungry. It’s true that you can set up a barbeque and ask someone to cook hot dogs for the rest of the day, but that means the volunteer gets to miss out on all of the fun.
You should think about hiring a food truck in Toronto from a trusted local company like The Food Dudes for the event — they will have lots of delicious food, professional customer service and experience handling matters like health regulations. This specific food truck company in Toronto can also prepare a variety of dishes that will please everyone crowding around the neighborhood — you will likely have attendees that are vegetarian, vegan, lactose-intolerant, gluten-free or that are just plain picky.
Step Three – Plan For Lots Of Entertainment
If you want to throw a successful block party for your neighborhood, you need to come up with games, demonstrations, and activities that will get people excited to show up and get engaged. If the area has a lot of families with young children, think of setting up a face-painting booth, planning obstacle courses and hiring a magician to awe them with tricks.
Set up great block party activities that adults will love like baking competitions where all of the contestants have to include one special ingredient in their recipes, with winners getting prizes and bragging rights. Don’t forget to make sure there is lots of high quality drinking water for all the guests who attend the party!
You will be genuinely surprised by how many lovely connections you will make by the time your block party is over. The best part is that you know for a fact that these new friends only live a minute away from your house, and you’re bound to see each other again.
If you are interested in even more lifestyle-related articles and information from us here at Bit Rebels then we have a lot to choose from.
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