About 100 people, from a variety of organizations, local governments, and various walks of life, gathered together on Thursday night, each with the intention of learning how to create a stronger, and simply better community.
Former Battle River-Wainwright MLA Doug Griffiths now focuses on helping rural communities become viable, and overcome whatever obstacles may face them. He was in town on Thursday, to speak about his book, 13 Ways to Kill your Community, and conduct a workshop to get people thinking.
“I heard a number of positive comments from those in attendance. Most were about how dynamic Mr. Griffiths is and how what he said made sense,” said Penny Fox, general manager at Community Futures in St. Paul.
Griffiths offered a number of stories, about communities he had visited, stories he had heard, and success he had seen happen. He also spoke briefly about his own background, growing up on a ranch in rural Alberta. He went to school first to get a degree in philosophy, then again to get his teaching degree.
Griffiths taught at a junior high school, where he learned that telling students what they should do didn’t always translate to a message that was truly heard. He then started asking students what they could do to ruin their lives, and received a much more engaged reaction.
Students quickly realized that the small things they were doing every day, were actually ruining their lives, rather than leading to success.
“Every single one of us wants success,” said Griffiths, but, we all do thing to undermine our own success. This is also often the case with communities. He added that under everything, there is one thing that is crucial, and that is “our attitude.”
“Our communities change, just like everything else, and if we want to keep and create the place in which we want our families to live, than we need to look at ourselves,” said Fox, when speaking of her thoughts after the presentation, “We have to check the negative habits, we need to start talking about the good things and we need to tackle the changes we want, small items to start and one at a time.”
The first of 13 things on Griffiths list of how to ruin a community is to ensure the community has poor quality of water. People now expect good water, noted Griffiths.
The second item on his list was “Don’t attract business,” and Griffith offered a number of stories about this topic. He explained how one community he visited was struggling, and after spending some time in the community, it was realized that the town was pushing businesses away if they were seen as competition to an already-existing business.
Griffiths noted that he has noticed a community with 1,500 people can have one grocery store, and that storeowner almost always says it’s struggling to stay afloat. A community of the same size with two grocery stores would have storeowners who say the opposite, and fair better.
Attracting competition creates happier consumers, who will stay in the community to shop. The community that had the strong culture of pushing competition away went from having 1,200 people to only 700 today, noted Griffiths.
The third tip on how to kill a community is to not involve youth. Griffiths noted that many communities ask how they can keep their youth, but he noted that communities need to encourage youth to leave, and experience the world, but then draw them back.
He also spoke about how his dad spent 22 years convincing him that he did not want to take over the family farm, only to wonder why Griffiths said no when his dad asked later if he wanted to take it over.
One simple piece of advice Griffiths offered on how to keep young people around is to simply “shut up.” Running the community and its people down won’t help attract youth.
The fourth tip Griffiths offered was to “deceive yourself.” If a community can’t identify who it is, it is sure to fail. He noted that he recommends communities round up “the people of influence, rather than the people of power,” to make a list of what’s wrong with the community, and what’s great about the community.
One town did this, and the list of what was great helped remind people about the good things that exist in the community, while the list of things wrong influenced a group of people to start fixing those things.
Fox said she took this point to heart, saying, “we need to be reminded of the great stuff, and we need to get engaged and change the things that bother us. This is true in a community, in a group, in an organizations, or in our own lives.”
The fifth item Griffiths told people they could do to kill their community was to shop elsewhere. He noted that on average, $1 spent in a community touches seven other hands before it leaves the community.
He also noted that jealousy over another community member’s successful business can ruin communities since people will shop elsewhere to avoid those jealous feelings.
Jealousy is “purely illogical,” said Griffiths.
The rest of Griffiths list in his presentation on how to ruin a community includes items such as don’t paint or fix things, don’t cooperate, live in the past, ignore seniors, be short-sighted and don’t look outside the community for new ideas, ignore immigrants and newcomers, don’t take risks, and don’t take responsibility.
A workshop wrapped up the night, with many people staying to participate. St. Paul & District Chamber of Commerce executive director Linda Sallstrom said she was surprised and pleased to see how many people stayed for the workshop.
During the workshop portion, Sallstrom said she noticed that when issues have personal stories connected to them, there’s more of an impact. Sallstrom also said she witnessed a willingness to work together, which was “quite incredible.”
“We had a lot of different groups represented,” said Sallstrom, adding, after the night wrapped up, she heard a lot of good feedback, but also a lot of questions on where to go from here. She noted that she was interested to know if the local municipal representatives that were in attendance would like to see some follow-up done on the topics brought forward.
“As organizers, we hope this is just the start of many conversations where people in the community come together and work together,” said Fox.
