Peace River African Descendants Society Event: February 20, 2010

The Peace River African Descendants Society (PRADS) is celebrating Black History Month with a great event on February 20 at the Belle Petroleum Centre. There will be a dinner and then entertainment by Ezeadi Onukwulu and One Human Race. Tickets are $30 and available at Java Domain and the Belle Petroleum Centre or by emailing prad.society@gmail.com. See you there!

Community Vision/BVI/MSP

Did the acronyms in the title intrigue you? Peace River has a lot going on and we're hoping that Peace River and area residents will become active in each of them!

Here's one: The Business Vitality Initiative (BVI) "measures the business-friendliness of your community, compares the results to other communities, helps you come up with strategies for improvement and launches your community into action" (CIEL website).

In July, I attended the Rural Matters! conference in Edmonton, sponsored by the Alberta Association of Municipal Districts & Counties (AAMDC). Mayor Callioux and Councillor Laurin also attended and we all learned much from the sessions we attended.

It was at one called "Tools to Build Entrepreneurial and Vital Communities" with Mike Stolte of CIEL (Centre for Innovative & Entrepreneurial Leadership) that I heard about the possibility of a pilot project in Alberta. I let Mike know that Peace River might be interested and would be an ideal community.

Now Alberta Agriculture and Rural Development has partnered with CIEL to deliver a pilot project for one of CIEL's tools, the BVI, in four rural Alberta communities and Peace River is one of them! January-February is roughly the time for this initiative. Public input is an important feature of this initiative.

Here's another: Municipal Sustainability Planning MSP. Peace River is one of a number of Alberta communities that will receive support from the Alberta Urban Municipalities Association (AUMA) for this planning, which will involve public input.

And another: Planning is underway for our community visioning process. Mark your calendar: on December 9, there will be two sessions available for Peace River and area residents to participate. More details to follow so keep an eye on the Town's website.

As we move ahead with each of these initiatives, they will build on each other and by June, we should have a comprehensive and exciting vision along with action plans to carry us forward.

Stay tuned for more details in the coming weeks and months. These are exciting opportunities for residents to help to identify a vision and set the course for the future.

Tamarack & Six Thinking Hats

No, I didn't fall off the face of the earth! After just two blog entries about the fabulous Tamarack Communities Collaborating Institute, it seemed like every moment was taken up and there was little time for writing. Sleep became more important.

It was a great week in Kitchener and I'm so grateful that I was able to attend. There were so many connections made with people who are working for change in their communities.

Learning about the work that Hamilton's Roundtable on Poverty Reduction is doing was a particularly inspiring, but there were so many community movers and shakers from a wide variety of organizations, including United Way and community foundations, a credit union, immigrant organizations, Vibrant Communities (including Vibrant Edmonton and Vibrant Calgary), and many more.

Of the 80 participants, I think I was the only elected official, but the new executive director of Vibrant Edmonton is a former City of Edmonton Councillor, so we had lots to talk about.

A number of Albertans met at the end of the Institute to figure out how we can keep the momentum going in our province for creating change through community collaboration. More on that as we have a chance to process all we learned and to get back in touch with each other.

Following the week in Kitchener, I travelled to Ottawa for a 2-day workshop on Edward de Bono's Six Thinking Hats tool. De Bono coined the concept of "lateral thinking" and has written dozens of books on thinking and decision-making. The workshop was an excellent opportunity to build on things I learned at Tamarack;

del.icio.us Tags: collaboration,change,workshops,poverty

and the idea of parallel thinking using the six hats, along with the creativity activities, will be of much use in many areas of my professional, public, and personal life.

Next week, Mayor and Council are in Edmonton attending the Alberta Urban Municipalities Association (AUMA) convention. If I get a chance, I'll post updates.

Communities Collaborating Institute Day 1

I'm in Kitchener, Ontario, attending the Tamarack Communities Collaborating institute. Last night I had dinner with a group from Alberta--Calgary United Way and City of Calgary--and one woman from Grand Forks, BC. Interestingly, one of the people at the table was not only familiar with Peace River, but was born and raised there.

We had a long day of getting to know each other (there are nearly 80 of us from across Canada and a contingent from New Zealand), hearing about what we'll be doing over the week, forming our learning "pods," and listening to some excellent presentations, including one by Sherri Torjman of the Caledon Institute of Social Policy.

Sherri spoke about her new book, Shared Space: The Communities Agenda and discussed the framework from which she looks at the very complex work that needs to be done in communities to improve the lives of people. I read the book prior to coming to Kitchener, but it was wonderful having a chance to hear the author, an inspiring speaker as well as writer, talk about those ideas and to draw on her vast knowledge of the exciting collaborative activities that are happening around the country and the world.

After dinner with my learning pod at a Vietnamese restaurant, we met with other participants for coffee and dessert at a social enterprise called the Queen Street Commons, a cafe and kitchen that is an extension of the Working Centre's Urban Agriculture Program (which "aims to reconnect city folks with the local food system").

When we returned to the hotel, there was a huge tour bus sitting outside with a police car, lights ablaze, and inside, lots of activity and quite a buzz. It appears that the Prime Minister and his campaign team are sharing our hotel tonight.

Vibrant Communities/Poverty

This morning I visited the Tamarack: An Institute for Community Engagement website (http://tamarackcommunity.ca/g2.php) for information on Stand Up Against Poverty events around the world on October 17, which has been recognized since 1992 by the United Nations as the International Day for the Eradication of Poverty . You can see the list of Canadian events at: http://www.standagainstpoverty.org/events/ca

Also on the Tamarack website is information about the Vibrant Communities initiative. Although there are no small towns involved, I wonder if we couldn't learn from the work being done in large urban centres? Edmonton and Calgary are involved as "Trail Blazer" communities so we have role models close by.

Vibrant Communities is described as "a community-driven effort to reduce poverty in Canada by creating partnerships that make use of our most valuable assets – people, organizations, businesses and governments. It’s a unique approach to poverty reduction that allows communities to learn from — and help — each other."

If you want to learn more, here's the URL: http://tamarackcommunity.ca/g2s1.html

The Poverty Action Committee is a small group of people in Peace River working on the issue , but they can't do it alone. What else could we be doing, as a community, to tackle poverty in our midst? Is there a role for Town Council?