The Town of Sidney wants to hear from residents about their experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic through an online survey.
The municipality wants to use the survey, available until July 3 at surveymonkey.com/r/P9CP9KP, in shaping local recovery efforts. The survey, with its 27 questions, focuses on issues including the economic effects of the pandemic on residents with several questions exploring the employment status of residents before, during and after the pandemic; work and housing arrangements; as well as questions that focus on personal and community well-being, as their volunteerism and involvement with community groups.
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The survey also asks residents whether they applied for personal funding assistance, whether they experienced difficulties in accessing certain goods, whether they might be more inclined to purchase or obtain items locally, and whether they have or plan to grow food at home.
While the survey, for the most part, consists out of multiple-choice questions, the back-end of the survey includes several open-ended questions that ask residents about some of the creative ways in which they maintained contact with others, some of their unique challenges and unexpected benefits or opportunities that emerged during the pandemic. The survey also encourages residents to submit specific initiatives for future consideration or more general observations.
Sidney’s survey appears after the Saanich Peninsula Chamber of Commerce and the Sidney Business Improvement Area Society (SBIA) developed and conducted a survey in collaboration with Sidney staff and the municipality’s emergency operations centre to assess the impacts of the pandemic on the local business community.
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