A partnership with several community organizations is aimed at keeping the public better informed of what is happening throughout Winchester-Clark County.

Through an initiative led by the tourism office, the city has created an online community calendar that shows events happening within the month. The events on the calendar are color-coded to indicate whether they are civic, educational, entertainment, heath/wellness oriented, governmental, youth-directed or youth sports.

The calendar is live and can be found at www.winchestercommunitycalendar.com.

Tourism Director Nancy Turner said she and others in the community have been looking for a long time at an efficient way to create and manage a calendar that would also be affordable. 

She added that the idea for the website came from a friend who had worked on a similar site in Frankfort.

“We looked at it and said, ‘Who might be willing to partner locally on this?’” Turner said. “That’s how we came about it.”

The calendar is funded through a partnership among organizations including WKYN, the City of Winchester, Clark County government, Winchester-Clark County Tourism, the Clark County Industrial Authority, Clark County Public Schools, the Clark County Extension Office, the Clark County Health Department, The Winchester Sun and the Clark County Library.

Mayor Ed Burtner, who has pushed for something like this for years, said he hopes the calendar will become a tool people in the county can use to help plan for events and be active in the community.

He said that while the individual partner organizations have always had their own methods of informing the public about upcoming events, this calendar distills all that information into one place, where it can be viewed by the public.

“This week is a perfect example,” Burtner said. “There are so many things happening this weekend.”

Turner said event posting is not just limited to the partnering organizations. Any group can make a post on the calendar about a community-wide event, but the funding partners will be able to vet others’ posts and remove any that do not fit with the mission of the calendar.

“We want this to help bring the community together,” Turner said. “We really do have a lot that’s going on in this town, and we hope this is an avenue to get that message out.”