The Colby Waterville Alliance (CWA) is helping students find love this February. With Valentine’s Day approaching, the group will be adding a “Date Night” element to its annual Burst the Bubble Week which will take place on the last week in February.

Date Night is scheduled for Friday, February 24, when several Waterville restaurants will be offering discounts to students. The premise for Date Night is to get students to dine downtown, in the hopes “of trying to improve the dating culture on campus” Emily Fleming ’12, the president of CWA, said. Whether you are asking someone out for a romantic evening or simply going out to eat with a friend, CWA encourages students to support local businesses and form relationships outside of the College community.

The CWA also plans to continue its latest promotion for shopping locally with a Valentine’s Day-themed Business of the Month. The Business of the Month campaign, which began last semester, has already highlighted Selah Tea, Lebanese Cuisine and Mum Mum (a Thai sandwich shop).

The tentative choice for February’s Business of the Month, “in the spirit of Valentine’s Day and chocolate,” Fleming said, is Acadia Cakes. “They make delicious-sounding cakes and cupcakes” she said. If plans succeed, the business will be offering student discounts all month and CWA will bring samples to campus.

Similar to previous years, Burst the Bubble Week plans to include a Kids on the Hill day, when Waterville children from the South End Teen Center could come to sled and eat a meal with students at the College. The week will conclude with the annual Battle of the Bands on Saturday, Feb. 25.

Because the College’s campus has several dining facilities, a bookstore and its own pub, students don’t often think about leaving campus, Fleming said, explaining the impetus for Burst the Bubble Week. And when students do venture off the Hill, they tend to visit places like Wal-Mart and Starbucks, Fleming said, so they’re “getting off the Hill, but [they] aren’t supporting local business.” She explained how simply leaving campus doesn’t mean you’re actually bursting the “bubble” and creating positive relationships within the community.

CWA also hopes to improve community integration between students and Waterville residents who don’t own businesses or directly participate with Colby volunteers, as it is often difficult to build relationships with “the subset of the Waterville community that we don’t necessarily interact with every day,” Fleming said.

CWA is encouraging both communities to participate and attend PechaKucha, an event that is scheduled for April 20 on campus. Described as a “concert of ideas”, PechaKucha provides a chance for people to showcase their special interests or talents via PowerPoint presentation (with twenty 20 slides, and 20 seconds per slide). Whether you “have been abroad, collect spoons or baseball cards or [something],” everyone–Colby students and Waterville residents alike–have something unique that they can share with the community at large at PechaKucha, Fleming explained.

CWA’s upcoming events are an easy way to meet some new people, support local businesses and therefor contribute to breaking down the barriers between the Waterville community and the Colby community. We can observe the “power there is in collaborating [and we can] see a lot of great things happening” Fleming said.