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Rotary needs you to vote everyday

The Burns Lake Rotary Club is hoping to receive funding for a multi purpose outdoor arena.

The Burns Lake Rotary Club is hoping to receive funding for a multi purpose outdoor arena.

The outdoor arena will be used for hockey and ice skating during the winter, will be well lit and free of charge. During spring, summer and fall the outdoor arena could be used for ball hockey, lacrosse, basketball, roller skiing and roller skating and the Burns Lake Rotary Club say it would also be an ideal site for community activities such as a farmer's market due to its central location, with plenty of space for parking. Burns Lake Rotary Club president Terri Dickson said, "One of the key goals for the project is to make the Dick Schritt Rotary Ball Park site more attractive to both locals and tourists."

The site has already been visited by an engineering firm and a geo-technical survey is currently under way. "We anticipate constructing the arena in late spring 2012, as soon as the ground is workable," she said.

The idea for the multi purpose outdoor arena was submitted to the third annual Aviva Community Fund competition and has made it through the first round of community voting.

With round two voting in the Aviva Community Fund competition now underway, the Burns Lake Rotary Club needs the community to get behind the project and vote. Up to $150,000 could be awarded to see the project become a reality.

The more online votes the project receives the better, because the most popular ideas move through the three rounds and into the semi finals.

Round two voting ends on Nov. 9, 2011, and 5,000 votes are needed for the Burns Lake project to progress to round three.

Burns Lake Rotary Club president Terri Dickson said, "We will need to access our out of town networks in order to win the next round, so supporters should email the link to the project to as many family members and friends as possible. Facebook contacts also work well because people can post the link and remind their contacts to vote each day."

Each person who registers on the Aviva Insurance website gets 15 votes for each of the three initial rounds and then 15 votes to use during the semi finals. People can only vote once a day for each idea.

The top 30 ideas from the online votes are then judged by a panel, who rank the ideas in three categories; small, medium, large.

The judges determine a score for each of the 30 ideas, using a set of weighted criteria including the number of people the project will benefit, how original the idea is and how urgent the community need is.

Each finalist will then be ranked from one to 30 based on the score given by the judges.

The Aviva Community Fund then starts funding the projects, starting with the highest ranked ideas and moving down the list. They will keep funding ideas until the entire Aviva Community Fund of $1 million has been allocated.

Dickson said, "Village Insurance is supporting us as a local Aviva broker which allows us to enter into the Aviva competition for an additional $150,000 prize."

To register to vote for the multi purpose outdoor arena go to www.avivacommunityfund.org and sign up.

All you need to do is click on the vote button. The Burns Lake Rotary Club project can be found at http://www.avivacommunityfund.org/ideas/acf12267.

Or you can register to vote through a Facebook account. You can then vote directly from the Aviva Community Fund Facebook page at www.Facebook.com/AvivaCommunityFund.

You can cast all 15 of your votes at any time within each round, but you can only vote for each idea once a day.

Round three voting will begin on Nov. 14 and end on Nov. 30, 2011.

Voting for the semi finals begins on Dec. 5, 2011, with competition winners being announced on Jan. 25, 2012.