Building Community and Supporting Local Businesses Through Food and Drink Specials

Small businesses are the backbone of any community, and how we treat those most in need reflects who we are as a whole. At Just Oshawa, we believe that love is for everyone, and this guiding principle shapes everything we do. Our network is designed to uplift local small businesses, support individuals, and foster a compassionate community.

We actively gather and share content that our community will find valuable. By building a hyper-local network, dedicated entirely to Oshawa, we ensure that the content you see is verified and directly tied to Oshawa-based small businesses, groups, or organizations providing tangible support to the community.

Why Just Oshawa?

As part of our ongoing efforts to strengthen the community, we offer verified content so that when you see posts within our network, you know they originate from Oshawa. Whether it’s about a small business or an organization, you can trust it’s real, relevant, and focused on benefitting our local community.

While the network is hyper-local, its impact can go beyond Oshawa as others will naturally want to follow and engage with our content. This attention helps us raise awareness of various fundraising efforts, such as those under our LIFE Community Project. Our mission is rooted in universal values of love and compassion, transcending ideological boundaries and building an inclusive and supportive community.

Our Key Focus Areas

To offer continuous, no-cost support for local small businesses, we’re building regular features, including:

• Food and Drink Specials
• Weekly Events
• Verified Listings of local restaurants, small businesses, artists, groups, and organizations

Our verified listings ensure that the businesses and organizations are genuinely based in Oshawa, with active participation in the community. Whether it’s a local restaurant offering a special deal or an organization providing essential services, our network shines a light on these valuable resources.

Escaping the Pay-to-Play Social Media Model

A key reason we built this network was to move away from the costly "pay-to-play" model seen on mainstream social media platforms. This model benefits large, well-funded groups while grassroots organizations and small businesses struggle to keep up. Instead of wasting resources on boosting posts, our funds and energy are focused directly on supporting those who need it most.

On our platform, there are no algorithms deciding what content you see. Unlike traditional social media, where mostly paid content makes it to your feed, Just Oshawa shows you everything in real-time, as it is posted. You have control over the content you see, whether it’s updates from friends, groups you’ve joined, or special deals from local businesses.

Additionally, our platform features ad space that directly supports fundraising efforts, ensuring that the money generated stays in the community and goes towards making a positive impact.

Supporting Small Businesses and the LIFE Community Project

We promote local small businesses and organizations across nine social networks to raise awareness for our Just Oshawa content. This approach not only increases visibility for Oshawa’s small businesses but also supports the LIFE Community Project’s mission of delivering aid without being burdened by expensive advertising costs.

By simply posting content from our fundraising activities, we are building reach and engagement that doesn’t rely on paying for every post. Over time, this will help us generate additional funds through ad space on our website while ensuring that no one’s content is pushed down in favor of paid posts.

How You Can Help

If you are a small business owner or community member in Oshawa, you can support our efforts by sharing content, becoming a member (membership is and will always be free), and actively engaging with the network. Members receive exclusive benefits like access to free draws, products, and other exciting offers.

Together, we can continue to grow this network and increase the benefits for everyone in our community. Just Oshawa exists to support local businesses, community members, and those most in need. Join us in making Oshawa a stronger, more compassionate place for all.

LIFE – Love Is For Everyone

You may have seen some posts about the start of a new food program and fundraising efforts, we still have more to share.

First, we have a new program starting here in Oshawa, Not Just A Food Program that will start in May.

The great news is that we have our fundraising platform now complete and ready to start with ongoing fundraising efforts. We have some great plans to help with fundraising efforts for other small Oshawa-based groups/organizations. You can find a list of all the Fundraising Products available for fundraising efforts here in Oshawa. 

Visit our The Basics Fundraising With Us to learn more. Just Oshawa is a hyperlocal network and part of our plan shortly is to have local artists who would like to participate in fundraising efforts in Oshawa to be able to list some of their products for fundraising efforts. We will be posting more about this in a future Newsletter Update, we wanted to share a little of our plans with the fundraising products. 

In the coming days, you will start to notice we will be seeking local small businesses that would like to help raise awareness of the various fundraising efforts we will have. Through a combination of print/social media posts, we will expand our reach and engagement for all of our efforts with full promotions for our signature listings. This will be an ongoing expansion, adding more Food/Drink Specials, Events, adding more small businesses with our listings in Bars/Restaurants/Venues,
Small Businesses, Artist Marketplace, and Groups/Organizations. It will be free for Oshawa small businesses to have their business listed with us in the appropriate sections, this will always be the case.

We also wanted to you know that we will be starting our first draws, these draws will be free, just for being a member of our Just Oshawa group. We love to give back, we are very thankful for your support and the support of the efforts to assist those most in need. All draws will need to be picked up/delivered in Oshawa, depending on the prizes, you may find some are in digital formats and are for our Oshawa members.

LIFE - Love Is For Everyone

We have a lot of great news to share, our new group for Just Oshawa, your hyperlocal network for Oshawa. We have started to migrate all the content from our old website to this network. This will allow us to not only allow members to join with basic profiles but also help us reduce spam and unwanted content. We have additional abilities to allow the admin to control specific groups bringing greater privacy to the work with those most in need we do.  We require all members to act with love and compassion for all, we take this seriously and will ban anyone not participating with love for all. Love is about acceptance, and celebrating our differences, this is a simple truth that guides us with all our activities. Want to learn more about this, visit our LIFE - Love Is For Everyone group. 

Most content is public and anyone can visit the website but only members can access the My Page content or Members Pages, and only members can join the conversations and add content. 

All listings are free for Oshawa small businesses, to learn more about the benefits of the free listings, visit our Social Media Collective Marketing, and for more detailed info visit our SMCM page. We will be adding more content to this section as we go that will include upcoming events.

With Just Oshawa, we maintain our signature Food/Drink Specials and Weekly Events listings, and with this new group for Just Oshawa, we have a greater set of options to help you discover the content that interests you most. We added a Daily Option and a section for Categories that we hope will help you easily find the content you seek. In the coming days, we will be adding the 30+ venues already listed and updated then adding more as we reach out to more Oshawa venues. We are also starting to update and add the Oshawa events that are weekly first then will start adding other 1 off events found in Oshawa. Once this work is complete we will add and start to promote along with methods to send us details to add your Oshawa events to our listings.  

Our Free Meals option was the first section we completed, for more than 5 years we have maintained these free meals in Oshawa list. By adding the Daily search option and the by-meal type we know this will be a valuable tool to assist those most in need, more and more find themselves with food insecurities and we hope this will be helpful.

You will start to see more and more of our Oshawa Connections being added to the following listings: Bar/Restaurant/Venue, Oshawa Artist Marketplace, Group/Organization, and Small Businesses. One of the improvements we made was that we have a Downtown option with each category. You will find that as we add more content you will start to see more and more categories added. All content is verified to be in Oshawa, we do not post or share content that is not in or from Oshawa. We know how frustrating it can be to find Oshawa content, many of the groups say Oshawa but you find content across the Durham Region or other communities, just know that when we add content to Just Oshawa we verify the content to be Oshawa content, it that simple we are hyperlocal for Oshawa and maintain that objective at all times. 

We will leave this update with the knowledge that we have started adding to the Pics In Oshawa and will find a variety of images and you can select from not just type of pics like Butterflies, and Landscapes but also the option by date taken. Again we verify that all images have been taken in Oshawa and the photographer's name is included with each pic. This will give you an idea that shortly we will be adding different photographers to the pics taken in Oshawa. 

In the coming weeks, you will see posts about the LIFE Community Project, LIFE, Fundraising, and FIFE sections when we have these sections completed. Watch for more news as we complete the work and start the various projects/programs.

LIFE - Love Is For Everyone