Thanks to a generous donation from Supervisor Don Knabe, Oasis Resident Services hosted a Thanksgiving potluck for all of the families living at Cabrillo Gateway.  For a few hours, 28 of our households (31 adults and 48 children) were joined by staff from Gateway, the Property Management Office and student interns to eat together and share holiday memories with their neighbors.  The room was filled with the aromas of a fresh Thanksgiving meal including turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes and pumpkin pie. Read more about our Thanksgiving festivities in the Winter Edition of the Village Anchor!

Election Day was special at CVC.  After years of lobbying the County of Los Angeles Registrar-Recorder, we finally were granted the opportunity to host our own polling site!  This long-sought opportunity coincided with the creation of a civic engagement concept called Place Make The Vote. Championed by a local community partner, City Fabrick, a Knight Cities Challenge Award was granted to energize civic engagement on election day in underrepresented parts of the city. As a steady stream of  CVC residents and citizens residing in the precinct came to vote on Tuesday, November 8th, they were greeted with coffee and donuts in the morning, pizza and empanadas in the afternoon and the continuous sound of music, the smell of popcorn and the sight of numerous carnival games throughout the day. Community members were also treated to a digital photo booth, complete with red, white and blue props of all kinds, to have their photos taken and immediately uploaded onto social media platforms as well as being printed on the spot.  You can check the GIFs out here, and find photos and reactions from the event at the CVC facebook and twitter pages and the City Fabric twitter page. The voter turnout percentage has been in the low 20s in previous elections, so we feel we did extremely well by recording in the mid-400 range of actual voters in a precinct with slightly more than 1000 registered voters! Many thanks go to all the election workers and all of the volunteers from City Fabrick and CVC who helped Make CVC the Place to Vote in 2016!

On Saturday, August 27th, residents and guests of Century Villages at Cabrillo were treated to a wonderful afternoon of classic Rock and Roll music by the talented Rock The Vets group, made up of a group of Veterans receiving services from the Long Beach VA and a few professional musicians from nonprofit organization, The Rock Club, Music is the Answer. Also performing was the American Gold Star Mothers Choir who sang several songs to the delight of the audience hanging out on CVC’s Grand Lawn. The performance was a showcase meant to let CVC residents know about a music therapy program being started by CVC to encourage our community to come together through music. The Village Jam, as the group will be called, will be coached by professional musicians who will come to the CVC campus weekly to lead jam sessions and help the group develop their own sound. This pilot program is being funded directly by Century Villages at Cabrillo and with generous donations from Walton Construction, Walton Electric, and Gayton Painting contractors who are currently working on the Anchor Place development. CVC has purchased drums, guitars, speakers, microphones, and amplifiers for the group with the hope that the band will continue to grow and evolve and be a regular feature at our community events. By the end of the day, we had signed up 23 would-be musicians for the Village Jam on September 9th. Stay tuned for future updates.

Judges for the 2016 Gold Nugget Awards have named CVC’s Cabrillo Gateway as an Grand Award winner in its annual competition, which honors architectural design and planning excellence and draws entries from throughout the United States and internationally. CVC earned its Grand honors for Cabrillo Gateway in the Best Affordable Housing Community category. Chosen from the elite pool of Merit Award winners, Grand Awards were announced on June 23 as a feature highlight of PCBC, the nation’s largest regional conference and trade show for the real estate development field. You can read some of the great things the judges had to say about our 81 home community focused on veterans and families at risk of homelessness in the 2016 Winners Book. “Gold Nugget Award winners reflect our industry’s best, brightest and most innovative architects, planners and builder/developers,” said Judging Chairman and Gold Nugget ceremonies administrator Lisa Parrish. “We applaud them all, and were thrilled to recognize them on June 23 with a celebration of Merit and Grand Award winners.”