University of Guelph hosted OJS journals
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Co-creative Accompaniment: Building Renewed Relationships through Arts-Based Kin Making
No full textThis work delves into the convergence of arts-based community making, social sculpture, and kinship practices within a socially engaged artistic framework. Exploring concepts like accompaniment, Haitian notions of konesans and balans, and examining kinship beyond human connections, I propose arts-based kin making as a collaboratively imagined and enacted set of practices.
Drawing inspiration from Project Row Houses, notions of kinship and other scholarly works, this work aims to address both human and species loneliness amid the ecological crisis. Arts-based kin making emerges as a collaborative practice, fostering empathy, connection, and social connection through creative expression. I envision these concepts as intertwined elements guiding my practice toward redefining our relationship with the world
Coworking Takeover Week
No full textCoworking Takeover Week is a pilot project developed by Rural on Purpose. Rural on Purpose is a social enterprise working to create economic opportunities in rural communities by exploring high impact workforce trends. Studies show that within a decade the majority of our workforce will be freelance, and 18 percent of all freelancers currently live in rural areas. The Rural Coworking Pilot engages, educates and collects data from community members over a 10-week period ending with a Coworking Takeover Week, where the town "becomes" a coworking community for one week. Business owners have a chance to test a potential secondary income stream by creating space in the under-utilized areas of their business in which freelancers can work. Freelancers and home-based workers get a chance to connect and collaborate with other remote workers, as well as their local business community. The pilot tests a rural solution to building a freelance support ecosystem. It involves the entire community, explores business expansion and retention opportunities and provides an alternative to the standalone coworking centre that is statistically unsustainable in rural communities. The pilot tests for desirability (Does the community want it?), feasibility (Can they build it?) and viability (Is it financially sustainable?
Healthy Water, Healthy Community
No full textAccess to safe drinking water for many First Nation communities in Canada remains a serious problem. At any one time, approximately one in five First Nation communities is on a boil water advisory, some lasting for over a decade. There are many technical, institutional and political factors contributing to the water quality problem. To "fix" the water quality problem will require action at multiple scales and across numerous agencies and programs. One such program, source water protection planning, aims to protect a water source from the threat of water contamination. Source water protection is a land and water planning activity that first identifies threats to a water source and then seeks to reduce, or eliminate, those threats through land management actions. Riparian fencing, well-head protection and landfill relocation are all examples of management actions. Across the Canadian prairie several First Nation communities have engaged in source water protection planning. This presentation will provide an overview of these planning initiatives while outlining early success stories as well as some ongoing challenges
Collaborative Rural Community Energy Planning: The Health and Economic Benefits of Walking The Talk
No full textBritish Columbia Climate Action Charter provides Local Governments with the impetus and Carbon Tax funding to create collaborations, develop opportunities to increase energy efficiency, provide community financial savings and develop infrastructure to encourage healthy lifestyles. In the Kootenays, communities are taking action to improve their energy resilience, and have found the economic and health implications of plan implementation to be astounding. Community Energy Plans provide direction to develop active transportation plans, improve walking infrastructure and promote a healthy lifestyle. All while reducing community greenhouse gas emissions. The Plans have become the framework to apply for “Plan H” funding for sidewalk infrastructure, Active Transportation plans, walking school bus programs, etc., within the BC Interior Health region. Community Energy Plans engage the community, support healthy transportation choices and develop a collaborative inclusive community resilience. What began as a plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, through community involvement, partnerships, innovation and resolution, develops into an age-friendly and connected rural community. Communities are working to meet their GHG reduction targets while our population becomes more active. An active person reduces their chance of chronic disease (i.e., diabetes and cardiovascular disease). Community planning and design can influence the health of the population. One in three British Columbians are living with chronic disease. 50% of adults and 91% of children/youth do not have recommended levels of physical activity. Partnerships with the province and utilities supported the development of Community Energy Plans unique to each place and an active and engaged community results
Co-constructing Action-addressing Climate Change in Rural Communities
No full textRural places face unique challenges when it comes to climate change. Rural communities have, and will continue to see the impacts of climate change, necessitating action in the form of both ongoing mitigation (i.e., action to slow climate change) and adaptation (i.e., action to address the impacts of climate change. These communities often face difficulties in obtaining locally specific data and information, and are also subject to capacity limitations and limits in jurisdiction and mandate. However, rural places are also home to innovative and place-based ideas for tackling the emerging and complex realities of climate change.This panel brings together participants from the Columbia Basin Rural Development’s pilot project to test and refine indicators of climate change adaptation at the local scale. This project includes post-secondary researchers, subject matter experts, students and community staff. Project participants are working together to develop a process and supporting resources that will allow rural communities to better understand their local context with respect to climate change, tracking relevant changes, and identifying areas for local action. Panel participants will discuss:• The importance of local action on climate change• Their experiences and lessons learned from the project• Next step
How Co-operatives are Supporting Sustainable Rural Development
No full textRural communities struggle under the constant threat of government cut backs, and the widely held misperception of depleting populations and amenities. Over the years groups of determined rural group entrepreneurs have used the co-operative business model in innovative ways to meet community needs and seize opportunities. Today is no different. From succession planning to community power alternatives and technical services agencies to downstream processing facilities, rural people are joining forces to create unique solutions and successful businesses where others, such as government and market-driven corporations, either couldn’t or wouldn’t take the risk. The co-operative business model draws on the creativity and innovation of rural people to provide opportunities for rural communities, workforces and economies to thrive and grow. This paper presents four innovative applications of the co-operative business model in rural communities that were catalysts for job creation, economic growth and community development
New Approaches for Engaging the Public and Making Sense of Their Input
No full textMunicipal leaders often turn to the public (by choice or by pressure) to inform decision-making. But traditional town hall meetings or \u27sticky note\u27 workshops often raise just as many questions as they answer. New tools and methods are now available to decision and policy makers that can provide deep insights into Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous (VUCA) environments. These methods are NOT \u27another survey\u27, not another open mike public session. These methods engage stakeholders. And the outputs provide the best of qualitative and quantitative data gathering. We get visuals outputs (emergent patterns) but we also get the context (the stories behind the numbers). This presentation will offer case studies, plus a splash of theiry for understanding and navigating complexity
Rural Community Well-being: Opportunities to Be Harvested
No full textBuilding on our empirical studies in rural well-being this session will discuss complex nature of the challenges and the opportunities in rural contexts. The complexity of the problems necessitates multi-dimensional solutions. Strategies are sought that effectively offer agriculture-supporting, health-enhancing, damage-preventing, environmentally-sustaining and community-rejuvenating results. Rural communities face multiple external and internal stresses (Aked, Marks, Cordon, and Thompson, 2011; Cox, Frere, West, and Wiseman, 2010). The challenges our rural communities face are simultaneously technical, cultural, political, social, ethical, economic, and environmental. The efforts needed to work through the complexity and wicked issues are worthwhile as collaborators can harvest greater community resiliency, prosperity, sustainability, and vibrancy. This workshop will offer policy makers, practitioners, educators, and professionals along with industry leaders a helpful distillation of the literature on well-being and how our adaptations of the Canadian Index of Well-being can be a useful tool to ignite imagination for measuring and enhancing rural resiliency, prosperity, sustainability, and vibrancy. In this interactive workshop participants will be invited to share their experiences with what opportunities they see in these times of unprecedented climate change, pandemics of non- communicable (lifestyle) diseases, and declining economic vitality (Davis, Crothers, Grant, Young and Smith, 2012; Farmer, Prior and Taylor, 2012). Forging ways to work together across disciplines to enhance rural well-being will be encouraged. Examples will be shared of emerging strategies and successes like small scale production, cooperatives, and proactive farming communities contributing to the bio-economy and circularity among many other innovative opportunities ahead
What Makes Good Provincial Rural Policy?
No full textHow effective are provincial rural development policy and program interventions? How do we know if an intervention was a ‘good’ or an ‘effective’ investment of public funds? Governments across Canada are challenged to develop and implement robust, flexible, and effective rural policies and programs to meet the ever-changing contexts of rural communities. This poster outlines a three-year research initiative examining how provinces in Canada have defined rural development policies/programs, designed new initiatives, and evaluated their successes. The ultimate aim of the research is to provide evidence-based recommendations for designing, implementing, and evaluating successful rural development policies and programs to provincial government departments and agencies
A Country Childhood Idill. Return Migration to Rural Denmark
No full textMigration into rural areas is often explained in terms of the rural idyll, and the attraction of the countryside with its less hurried way of life. However, this migration phenomenon has mostly been researched in high-amenity, popular rural areas. This study investigates the motivations of potential and actual migrants to less-popular rural areas in Denmark. Addressing the narratives of 83 young adults, the study contributes to the orthodoxies of counter-urbanization literature by highlighting the complexity of rural in-migration processes, with a focus on rural return migration. This study reveals that traditional quality of life motivations, which form a central part of the classic counter-urbanization discourses, play a role in decisions to move to lesspopular rural areas. However, while the pull of the rural idyll and the importance of employment opportunities in the area are important considerations in the decision-making process for moving to a rural area, this study demonstrates that the conscious (and often subconscious) role played by nostalgic remembrances of own childhoods, notions of safety, social capital and belonging/not belonging act as primary drivers for choosing a specific rural area. Return migration, however, is also interwoven with ambivalent feelings and stigmatization leading to feelings of doubt, shame, disappointment and unfulfilment. Based on theoretical and empirical discussions, the unique potential of the countryside along with the opportunities and constraints that exists in a rapidly changing rural society are reflected on in relation to future development opportunities