Small communities across Canada share many of the same economic challenges, but it’s each municipality’s distinctive strengths that present opportunities for lasting growth.
That’s the guiding principle behind the Community Economic Development online certificate program launched last fall by Dalhousie and Cape Breton University (CBU).
Dal professor Jack Novack approached CBU about the partnership after watching the decline of small communities in rural Nova Scotia and recognizing that many of the challenges — a shrinking population and disappearing industries, to name two — were emblematic of what was happening across the country.
Aimed at local government administrators and community development professionals, the two-year distance program seeks to respond to the challenges in creating viable communities. It helps students identify and build upon their community's existing strengths, rather than squandering resources on trying to attract large corporations to town or favouring industries vulnerable to the vagaries of global markets.
"What we're helping people understand is that there is an alternative way to look at the local economy and one in which it is developed from the ground up," says Novack, who is director of local government certificate programs in Dal’s College of Continuing Education.
Cross-country participation
The program aims to equip students with the skills and knowledge they need to come up with novel solutions to their community's problems through a base of core literacy courses on local government structure, municipal law, financial management and citizen engagement, and two courses that focus specifically on community economic development.
Students also learn from the experiences of other practicing professionals across the country in online forums and exercises. Twenty-seven people from communities in nine provinces entered into the program last fall, including two from First Nations communities.
Richard Lane, a local development officer for Queen's County, N.S., is now in his second year of the program and says his municipality is still reeling after the closure of the local paper mill in 2012.
"The community is having to pretty much relearn the skills of entrepreneurship, self-employment, self-reliance and find what the strengths are within the community," says Lane.
Lane says the course has taught him that even within a small municipal unit like Queen's, it's important for people to look beyond their own departments for solutions.
Lane points to the Medway Community Forest Cooperative, located in Annapolis Valley with offices in Queen's, as one example of how his community is approaching development in a more sustainable fashion. Previously owned by paper giant Bowater, the land is now controlled by a community group that will determine whether it is managed for timber products or tourism and recreation.
Building on foundations
Keri Mitchell, a development officer from the small town of Edson, Alta. (northwest of Edmonton), also in the second year of the program, says the most valuable lesson she's learned so far is "take notice of what you have and build on it."
Edson's economy is based heavily around natural resources such as oil, gas, coal and forestry, which led Mitchell to explore the idea of setting up a technical school in the community to train those who will work in those resource sectors.
In the second year of the program, students are asked to complete a project where they apply material learned in the course to a problem in their own community.
Mitchell plans to focus her project on learning more about the impact of populations working in Edson but who reside in neighbouring municipalities.
"We currently don't know the impacts this group has on our community, but I would really like to quantify it," she says.
Real-world application
Shelby Lang, who is the program manager for this and other local government certificate programs at Dal, says students seem to appreciate the mix of different perspectives and the chance to apply the knowledge.
"It's important to see how they can take what they've learned and been reading into the real world," she says.
Dal and CBU have had the support of the Economic Developers' Association of Canada, the national certifying body, which has promoted the program in communities across the country.
Novack says the ultimate goal of the course is to help broaden people's understanding of their own role as leaders in the community.
"If we are successful, then we are hoping students will start to see their role and how it is expressed in their communities differently at the end than they did at the beginning of the program," says Novack.
Learn more: Certificate in Local Government: Community Economic Development
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