Communities in Transition Information Resource: February 2010

Tuesday, February 9, 2010

Welcome to the February postings of the CIT Information Resource!

Social media and the conversation about land in BC
How important are social media to what Tim Pringle calls "the conversation about use and conservation of land amongst various land use practitioners in BC communities?"

That's one of the questions we're going to be asking through an on-line survey in the coming months. What's clear is that more and more of you are using things like Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube or VIMEO, and podcasts, as well as blogs to tell the story of your community and the challenges and opportunities related to the land base.

When we started CITinfoResource as a blog-based way of capturing some of the exciting ideas and stories related to Communities in Transition projects we were very new to these new social media. That's changing. Rapidly. Some of us are quite active. Others less so. Some use things like Facebook purely for family and personal purposes. For example, Jen McCaffery, the principle CIT contact at the Real Estate Foundation of BC before taking mat leave, began to share the story of her new baby several months ago. Tim Pringle signed on, first as a curious "listener," and then as a thoughtful commentator on land use related posts on Vancouver Island and elsewhere. Executive Director Karin Kirkpatrick has recently started mini-blogging her experiences on Facebook from her iPhone, making the transition from a driver to a transit user – and micro-blogger – an engaging and educational process to witness.

CITinfoResource has an active presence online. We've updated our URL so it's easy to find: www.CITinfoResource.com. You can also find us easily on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube and VIMEO (search "CITinfoResource"). We're slowly building a library of images at Flickr. Please, take a look. Leave a comment. If you like what we're doing, add us to your favourites or become a "fan." We encourage all partner organizations to tag or label CIT-related photographs, videos, and posts with #CITinfoResource so we can help tell your story. Social media is making it easier to tell the story of change. It's also making it easier, as I describe in the closing column, for some local governments and NGOs to communicate with their constituents and to find cost-effective and time-sensitive responses to critical issues and opportunities.

Whether you receive CIT information via email, Twitter link, or Facebook post – or as a photocopy – you are participating in the "conversation about use and conservation of land amongst various land use practitioners in BC communities." If you're online, you'll notice that we're moving towards more "rich" content – audio and video posts instead of simple text-based blogs. Let us know if these formats are useful to you. As we noticed in the comments that flowed from Janine de la Salle and Mark Holland's piece on urban agriculture in November, some topics are hot and worthy of extended comments, and some formats make it very easy to engage people from across the province. We invite you to have your say!

Land use practitioners
The Governors at the Real Estate Foundation of BC have, over time, supported a diversity of perspectives and approaches to land use and conservation in BC. That's a boone to us at CITinfoResource, because we get to highlight very different ways of looking at our common resource. George Penfold, the Regional Innovation Chair (RIC) in Community Economic Development at Selkirk College (Castlegar) is a regular contributor. This month he asks about BC's rural development policy, a comment on a story we've been covering since before the October 2008 Reversing the Tide conference in Prince George. Nicole Vaugeois, RIC in Tourism and Sustainable Rural Development at Vancouver Island University (Nanaimo), writes about her research and community economic development activities.

Our other posts in this theme are audio interviews. Bryn White, Coordinator of the South Okanagan-Similkameen Conservation Partnership, describes this innovative regional approach to the "conversation about use and conservation of land" and how it is building capacity in local organizations, including local government. Kim Fowler is now the Sustainability Coordinator with the City of Victoria, but has worked with other municipalities and with the private sector. She talks about "performance-based" and "regulation-based" approaches to sustainable land use planning and development.

Following up on Resilient Cities, the 2009 Gaining Ground Summit
One of the things that social media allow us to do is to give conferences "long tails" – we interview organizers and participants before, during, and after important gatherings related to land use and sustainability in BC, and these materials are then available indefinitely on the internet. Our current focus is on Resilient Cities, the October 2009 Gaining Ground Summit in Vancouver. We asked a number of participants what their strongest impressions were of this powerful event, and what impact it will have on their home communities. We offer an audio interview with Naomi Devine, Whistler's Sustainability Coordinator and video interviews with Doug Makaroff, a developer involved with the Living Forest Communities initiative, as well as Gaining Ground founder Gene Miller.

Research notes – Green Values Vancouver Island
For several years the Governors of the Foundation have supported Green Values Vancouver Island, an initiative that looks at real estate development and sustainability on Vancouver Island's southeast quarter, which includes parcels of land associated with the E&N Land Grant of the late 1800s. Recently Tim Pringle, as the Foundation's Director of Special Programs, has been involved in a research project on large scale developments in this region. He talks to CITinfoResource about this research and its significance for communities in the region.

Please share these resources
A lot of you are telling us that what we do at CITinfoResource is useful. We encourage you to leave comments on the various posts or on Facebook. We also want to encourage you to reproduce and/or otherwise circulate what we've put together.

Collaboration and sharing of resources are keys to the success of both the Real Estate Foundation of BC and of the many projects and organizations that have received Foundation support over 22+ years. The reproduction of CIT Information Resource articles and materials for non-profit educational purposes is an extension of this approach. In return, we ask that you please notify the Foundation and the author of all reproductions, including in-house uses. You may also want to follow us on Facebook or on Twitter.

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©Real Estate Foundation of BC / 2010. We encourage the reproduction of articles on this website for non-profit educational purposes. Please notify the Foundation and the author of all reproductions, including in-house uses

Where is BC's Rural Development Policy?

by George Penfold

In my role as Regional Innovation Chair at Selkirk College, I have the opportunity to participate in many great workshops and conferences. Two recent events stand out – the Reversing the Tide conference in Prince George in October 2008, and more recently the OECD conference in Quebec City in October 2009. Both were on the theme of rural development and revitalization. What stood out at both events was the strong emphasis that all other Canadian provinces and other OECD countries place on rural issues and rural development compared to the province of BC.

The Quebec example

In Canada for example, Quebec has a "national" policy that says that the province wants

strong rural areas,
to ensure the survival of rural communities and identity, and
to rethink ways of building on the extensive development potential of rural areas, all in a sustainable way.

These sentiments are backed up with a signed formal rural partnership agreement between the province, municipal organizations, and two province-wide rural interest groups. As all provincial parties have agreed, this partnership agreement will be sustained even if government changes. The main outcome of the Quebec rural partnership is a dedicated funding portfolio. Implementation happens through a regional priority setting and planning process, which in turn leads to a long-term funding agreement between the region and the province. They work with 7 year program time frames and provide support for management of implementation.

This is quite different from what rural interest groups have to deal with in BC. The typical scenario here is a project-by-project pursuit of funding, trying to access federal and provincial programs that seem to be in perpetual motion in terms of priorities, administrative structures, and funding for rural development.

International examples

An international example comes from Scotland. In 1965 the Scots decided to improve social and economic conditions in rural Scotland and to enable rural areas to play a more effective role in national development. They established and funded two regional development boards. In 1991, the development board in Northern Scotland evolved into Highlands and Islands Enterprise. It serves just over 440,000 people and has a budget of approximately $180 million annually. Their current focus is on:

supporting high-growth businesses and sectors (thereby raising growth rates across the area)
creating the infrastructure and conditions to improve regional competitiveness, and
strengthening fragile communities in the region.

To address these goals, Highlands and Island Enterprise (HIE) aims to establish 500 or so business relationships by 2011. These relationships will help businesses develop and implement a growth plan that can be assisted with HIE financial support. In response to the infrastructure objective, HIE has invested in:

wind turbine manufacturing and a related marine energy centre,
centres for health science and marine science, and
a new centre for creative and cultural industries on the Isle of Skye.

To strengthen fragile communities, the emphasis is on:

investment in social enterprise,
the acquisition and development of income-generating assets,
building community capacity, and
stimulating growth.

Another international example comes from Finland, which established (by legislation) a Rural Policy Committee (RPC). The Fins recently announced an objective of developing 100mbps internet access throughout the country. Compare this to BC, where most of our rural areas have – at best – 10mbps service, with some communities still on dial-up.A significant common theme in these examples is a strong national or “upper tier” government statement about the importance of rural regions to the future development of the province or country, and a strong regional development focus along with local development initiatives.

In BC we have no clear statement about the importance of rural BC to the future of the province. We do have the provincial regional trusts (such as the Columbia Basin Trust in the Kootenays and Northern Development Initiatives Trust in the north), and various federal programs (through Western Economic Diversification for example), but these initiatives tend to focus on specific projects, mostly at the local level. We have few regional development organizations, policies, management capacity, or investment dealing with the “big picture” or the types of regional needs and opportunities that are being addressed in Scotland for example. Victor Cumming, Vernon's resident economic development sage, talked about what this could look like here in BC in his conversations with CITinfoResource last year [see CITinfoResource interviews of March 2009 and June 2009].

What do we want for rural BC?

Rural BC also needs to be clear about what it wants. We do have history in BC with regional development in terms of delivery of provincial programs, but little history with regionally managed development initiatives. We've either been too focussed on "local", or not committed enough to make regional initiatives work, or not bold enough to allow real investment in the future. To some extent then, we have what we thought we wanted.

For most of rural BC, what we have is a piecemeal strategy of rural development with local and municipal focus. Rural communities have generally not fared well over the last 2 decades with this approach. Our strategy seems to lack any real rural focus, and has resulted in provincially uneven development. Do we want to continue with this lack luster rural focus and resulting imbalance into the "teen" decade? Is there a willingness within "upper tiers" of government to take the initiative? Is there sufficient desire at at the grassroots and at the local and regional leadership levels to follow the lead of other provinces and other countries to make long-term, systemic investment for rural – and provincial – economic success?

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About the author:

GEORGE PENFOLD is the Regional Innovation Chair (RIC) in Rural Economic Development at Selkirk College in Castlegar, BC and Adjunct Professor at the School of Business and Economics at Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops, BC. In 2005 the Real Estate Foundation of BC contributed $100,000 to the RIC endowment fund at Selkirk College as part of its support for sustainable community planning and informed development in the greater Kootenay region. George is a regular contributor to CITinfoResource.com.

©Real Estate Foundation of BC / 2010. We encourage the reproduction of articles on this website for non-profit educational purposes. Please notify the Foundation and the author of all reproductions, including in-house uses.

Research and development of sustainable tourism in BC's rural communities

by Dr. Nicole L. Vaugeois, Vancouver Island

University

I am one of a number of BC Regional Innovation Chairs located in several non-metropolitan BC communities. George Penfold, a regular contributor to

the CITinfoResource, is a RIC at Selkirk College in Castlegar [see his current article in this issue, on rural development]. Dr. John Church is the RIC in Catttle Industry Sustainability at Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops [profiled in May 2009 at CITinfoResource]. The mandate of the BCRIC is to support rural communities that are diversifying their economic base. Amenity-bas

ed industries like tourism are a significant focus, and the RICs initiative emphasizes sharing innovation, ideas, and insight amongst BC communities, academic communities, and amongst the RICs themselves.

My focus at Vancouver Island Unversity is on sustainable tourism development for rural areas, something I've been working on for some time before being appointed to the RIC position. With a range of communities across BC, I've participated on projects that are successfully building capacity for tourism planning decisions. Many of these projects draw on the expertise of a network of academic, government, and non-government (NGO) partners. For example, since 2006 a multi-partner collaborative project has brought faculty and students out into rural regions of the province to engage in research projects and to share knowledge in presentations and workshops. It's called the Tourism Research Innovation Project, or TRIP, and you can find it online at www.trip-project.ca. TRIP has become self-sustaining and will continue enabling communities to tap into a variety of resources. The products from the project are intended to be free of cost and easy to access. All TRIP how-to manuals, innovation snapshots, videos, reports, and presentations are available for download from the website.

Linking Post-secondary Resources and Rural Opportunities

In my experience, the most valued resource that programs like RIC and TRIP can offer rural communities is the time and energy provided by University students. Through my work I've been able to act as a “knowledge broker,” connecting communities that have jobs to be done with faculty and students who have the necessary skills and interest. The list of jobs is varied and includes running focus groups, doing signage audits, conducting inventories, to name a few.

Our teams have been able to mobilize relatively quickly to respond to and collaborate with community partners to conduct a number of “participatory rural appraisals” to meet their information needs. For example, teams have worked in MacKenzie, Wells/Barkerville, Likely, and Gold River to provide on the ground assistance with information gathering. The success of this model is showing up in requests for similar collaborations from other communities. Given the demand, I am looking forward to finding more ways to bring teams into the field to engage in this type of activity.

Another example of successful extension activity relates to community signage, often cited as one of the biggest planning issues for tourism development in rural BC. The problem is one of enabling area visitors to navigate a rural region and discover and enjoy the "assets" of the area. Our team has developed a “how-to manual” on community signage that gives community decision-makers critical information on how to assess and improve signage. We've also provided teams of students to do “signage audits” for communities and businesses. This is a win-win situation: students love to do real-life projects that have real-world benefit to communities; and communities get important tourism planning work done that might helps them build their capacities.

Fostering Innovation in Sustainable Tourism

In the spring of 2009, I worked with colleagues from Thompson Rivers University, College of the Rockies, and University of Northern BC on a project called Fostering Innovation in Sustainable Tourism, or FIST. Our purpose was to identify examples of BC communities and tourism-related businesses that were leading the way in sustainability. Once located and interviewed, we developed a variety of tools to share these innovations. We developed a video, a manual of “Made in BC” innovators, and wrote a research report that outlines overall adoption of "sustainable" behaviours by rural operators. Many of the operators profiled have demonstrated valuable and successful ideas related to land use planning. By gathering these stories and creating means for sharing innovation, we are giving operators in other communities the opportunity to move more quickly to sustainable practices.

Based on my experience of working with rural communities, there is no shortage of ideas or desire by community leaders and business owners to develop 'sustainable' practices. Academic institutions can play a valuable role in supporting rural areas in economic transition – if they can find ways to get out into communities, form and maintain relationships, and provide timely resources such as research or students to help them make their decisions. It's exciting to see what our program in Tourism and Sustainable Rural Development at Vancouver Island University has accomplished in a short period of time. With Regional Innovation Chairs established in a number of non-metropolitan BC communities I'm optimistic that rural communities now have an established research and development tool to support their work in tourism innovation.

Current projects

I am currently developing a workplan to guide the VIU RIC research agenda for the next couple of years. It's important to me that it is responsive to the needs of the rural communities we work with, and I encourage groups and individuals to contact me. For our work to be of benefit, we need to hear about community needs, and to explore opportunities for synergy on existing projects.

In the meantime, I'm looking forward to BC’s first Rural Tourism Conference being organized in the North Shuswap region http://redtree.tru.ca/Conferences/index.htm from April 6-8th. Many of the lessons learned by those working in rural tourism throughout BC will be shared there. Our goal is to develop networks and to continue sharing lessons learned in the future. I encourage all readers of the CITinfoResource, and all CIT project partners to she would like to attend.

For more information about what I doing as the RIC at VIU, please visit my website at http://web.viu.ca/vaugeois. I also keeps a blog on sustainable rural tourism at: http://ruraltourismdevelopment.blogspot.com/

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About the author:

Dr. Nicole L. Vaugeois is the BC Regional Innovation Chair in Tourism and Sustainable Rural Development at Vancouver Island University, Nanaimo. The BC Regional Innovation Chair (RIC) in Tourism and Sustainable Rural Development was established in October 2008 at Vancouver Island University and is held by Dr. Nicole L. Vaugeois. The Real Estate Foundation of BC has invested in several RICs throughout the province through contributions to endowment funds. These are part of the Foundation's investment in supporting professionals and lay practitioners in moving towards more sustainable use and conservation of land in BC communities. Foundation support for Dr. Vaugeois' chair supports research and development of sustainable land use practices involving tourism in rural British Columbia.

©Real Estate Foundation of BC / 2010. We encourage the reproduction of articles on this website non-profit educational purposes. Please notify the Foundation and the author of all reproductions, including in-house uses.

Bryn White talks about the South Okanagan-Similkameen Conservation Partnership

Bryn White is the coordinator of the South Okanagan-Similkameen Conservation Partnership, an innovative coalition of regionally based organizations. SOSCP membes share a common interest in sustainable development and conservation of land. The partnership format provides a mechanism for diverse interests to come together, learn from each other, and develop complementary approaches to land use related challenges in the South Okanagan-Similkameen region.

CITinfoResource editor hanspetermeyer talks to Bryn about SOSCP's capacity building work amongst local government and non-governmental organizations in the region. This is the first in a series of conversations between CITinfoResource and land use/conservation focussed non-governmental organizations (NGOs).

This interview was recorded on January 7, 2010.

Kim Fowler talks about "prescriptive" and "performance" based approaches to sustainability

Kim Fowler is Director Sustainability with the City of Victoria. Her background includes work with local governments, and with the private sector, on innovative projects and approaches to community sustainability. CITinfoResource editor hanspetemeyer talked to Kim about local government and performance based and prescriptive approaches to community sustainability and sustainable land development. This interview was recorded on January 22, 2010.

Naomi Devine talks about Resilient Cities #GGRC09

Image via Wikipedia

Naomi Devine, Sustainability Coordinator with the Resort Municipality of Whistler (you can follow her on Twitter and get a sense of what it means to be a "sustainability coordinator" for a small but dynamic BC municipality). In this interview Naomi talks to CITinfoResource editor hanspetermeyer about her experience at the October 2009 "Resilient Cities" Gaining Ground summit (GGRC09). This interview was recorded on January 19, 2010 just after Naomi boarded the bus to work in Whistler.

Note:

The Resort Municipality of Whistler is one of a growing number of local governments in BC (and across Europe and North America) that is stepping into social media as a way to engage with citizens and the community at large. Following Naomi's posts on Twitter is one way to see how local government assumes a human face. You can see what the Resort Municipality of Whistler is up to on Facebook here.

Doug Makaroff talks about Resilient Cities, Gaining Ground 2009 #GGRC09

Doug Makaroff has over 19 years in the land use planning and development field, primarily with private clients working on various sustainability projects. He is currently leading the Living Forest Communities initiative. He talked to CITinfoResource editor hanspetermeyer on January 4,2010 about his experiences at the Resilient Cities Gaining Ground Summit of October 2009.

Gene Miller talks about Resilient Cities - the 2009 Gaining Ground summit GGRC09

Gene Miller is the visionary behind the Gaining Ground series of summits on sustainability. In this first of several video interviews with Gene, CITinfoResource editor hanspetermeyer talks to Gene in his Victoria apartment about Resilient Cities, the October 2009 GG summit (GGRC09). This is part of a series of conversations at CITinfoResource with GGRC09 participants about how that conference is changing lives and communities in BC.

Tim Pringle talks about large development projects on Vancouver Island

Tim Pringle is Director of Special Programs at the Real Estate Foundation of BC. In this interview, CITinfoResource editor hanspetermeyer talks to Tim about the Foundation's current research on large scale developments on Vancouver Island, and why this is important to Island communities. This research is part of the Foundation's Green Values Vancouver Island initiative. A summary of the research findings will be posted in coming months.

This conversation took place on January 22, 2010.

Tuesday, February 9, 2010

The Resilient Cities Interviews 1: Michelle Rule, City of Kelowna Councilor talks about Resilient Cities (CITinfoResource.com)

The Resilient Cities Interviews 1: Michelle Rule, City of Kelowna Councilor talks about Resilient Cities (CITinfoResource.com)

The Resilient Cities Interviews 1: Michelle Rule, City of Kelowna Councilor talks about Resilient Cities (CITinfoResource.com)

The Resilient Cities Interviews 2: Tim Pringle talks about GGRC09 (CITinfoResource.com)