 Cast is now starting. All attendees are in listen-only mode. Good morning everyone and thanks for joining us for today's BC Ideas Exchange Showcase where we're going to be talking about workforce and resident attraction success stories across British Columbia. My name is Jessica Ritchie and I'm with the regional programs and engagement brands of the Ministry of Jobs, Trade and Technology and I'm going to be providing the technical support and moderating our Q&A session at the end of today's webinar. I'm located in Victoria, BC on the unceded territory of the Coast Salish, I'm sorry, I'm the unceded Coast Salish territory of the Lekwungen people, today known as the Squymouth and Songhees First Nation. As you know, the webinar topic today is going to be resident and workforce attraction. We have two stories coming from panelists from the Coonies, Randy Morse and Terry Van Horn. However, through the stories you'll hear that they both have very different social economic areas and their communities have unique economic assets and as you hear from their stories they have different lessons that they've learned which they are going to be sharing as well as they'll be open for questions and some discussion at the end of the webinar. So save your questions that you might have because we would like to have some discussion about what's happening in other areas of the province and for you to be able to ask these experts on what else they have to share. Before we get into the webinar I'm going to just have a little bit of housekeeping. So if you're unfamiliar with this platform, hopefully this will answer some of your questions. So on your control panel you'll see that you have the opportunity to call in with your computer audio but if you are having any difficulty with the sound you can also use your phone line. Just click on the phone call button and you'll be able to phone number will pop up and you'll be able to call in with that number. If you do have any questions like I said just expand the question box and enter your question there. We will be saving most of the questions for the end of the session but that doesn't mean you need to ask them then. Ask them whenever they come up so you don't forget them. And you will be muted but if you would like to be unmuted during the discussion portion of the session use the raise your hand button on your control panel and we'll be able to unmute you and you can ask your question that way if you'd prefer to ask it yourself. Just a reminder and you would have heard this at the start of the session. This session is going to be reported and it will be posted on the BC Economic Development page on our website. You can search it at BC Ideas Exchange in the past webinars reporting section. Please feel free if you learn a lot of useful information to share this link in this YouTube video as well and other people will be able to benefit from it too. Before we get into it just a little bit I wanted to share just kind of what we are looking for from this webinar for you guys to be able to learn. Hopefully you'll be able to describe the resident and workforce attraction strategies and how they can fit into your community's plan. You'll be able to relate to the BC based stories and what they've done in terms of their workforce and resident attraction and you'll be able to identify actions that your community may be able to take from the communities that you work in or the communities that you work for for resident and workforce attraction. Before I pass this over to Randy to share what he's been working on, we'd just like to get a general idea of what level of resident attraction and community, sorry, where resident attraction fits into your community's priorities and their economic development strategy. So I'm going to just launch a quick poll and if you take a couple seconds just to answer the question that would be great. So how important is it to high priority, medium priority, low priority or not a priority at this time? So I'm going to close the poll but what I can tell you is 70% of you found that it's a high priority for your community at this time. 25% saw it as a medium priority and then 5% saw it as a low priority. So that shows the importance of this webinar and hopefully you're going to gather some really important information here. So without further ado, I'm going to hand this over to Randy Morse who's coming to us from CASLO. Randy, if you'd give us an introduction to yourself in the BC Rural Center before diving into the resident attraction campaign that you've been a part of in CASLO, that would be great. Sure. Terrific, Jess. Thanks very much for hosting and thank you for inviting me today. So the BC Rural Center is a nonprofit organization that's been around for over 10 years. And it's unique in the province in that it's the only non-governmental organization that's clearly and solely focused on issues of importance to rural British Columbians and First Nations members. We're talking about issues that range from agriculture to technology, community investment, education, health care, and the subject of today's webinar. Attraction, population attraction, bringing new people, new ideas, new jobs, new creativity to rural British Columbia communities. Our offices are located in Kamloops where our executive director Gordon Borgstrom is based and here in CASLO where I'm based. I'm the communications director for the BC Rural Center. So Jessica, I'm now looking at a very small window and I'm not sure that I'm able to advance slides. So if you could do that for me, that would be terrific. Oh yeah, not a problem, not a problem. So to start off, we've talked about the BC Rural Center. One of the issues that we've discovered in our work with rural communities over the years and this is evidenced by the results of this quick survey that Jess just held with over 75% of you saying that attracting new people to your communities is either a significant or at least a fairly important issue for you going forward. It's inescapable to notice that most small communities in rural British Columbia are graying. There's an outflow of young people. It's difficult for many communities to retain their young people once once they grad, and it's equally difficult for many communities to attract new young people in particular young families and most especially young families and young individuals who are entrepreneurial who might be interested in moving to a rural place and starting a new business or enterprise. So, in the face of that we started doing some research and we began to notice what we thought was something of a trend and that is a growing interest amongst some urban creative types, millennials and slightly older than that age category, in leaving major urban centers for the healthier, the more convivial lifestyles that they suspected rural places might offer. So, we wanted to test whether or not that was an actual sociological fact. We discussed various ways of doing that ranging from the boring and the scientific to the fun and the less than scientific, and we decided to err on the latter side and launch a contest. So, we came up with something called Escape the City. This was a contest that was clearly targeted at millennials with children based in metropolitan Vancouver, metropolitan Victoria, metropolitan Edmonton and metropolitan Calgary. It was completely social media based so the entirety of this initiative was focused on a campaign that zeroed in on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. And so, even though we did target those four metropolitan areas in Western Canada, because of the nature of the web of course folks elsewhere also came across information about the contest. The winners would win four nights, three days in Kauslow where I happen to be based, which is you'll have to take my word for it. A lovely picture asked village you can sort of get a sense of that from the small picture you see on your screen right now in the West Kootenai located on the shores of Kootenai Lake, one hour north of Nelson. Four nights and three days in Kauslow completely immersed in the local culture to win the contest entrance had to submit either a 250 odd word essay, or a video explaining trying to convince us why they were interested in the possibility of moving from their respective cities to a small place like Kauslow. The finalists were then interviewed on a video call like this one by myself and a committee of locals that we put together ranging from mayor of Kauslow to young parents grandparents, the principal of the high school here or the school I should say here, and a couple of other interested citizens. So, the result of this was actually sort of astonishing. First of all, Kauslow received a tremendous amount of media as a result. The radio was all over this major newspapers did stories. There were lots of online reports about the contest, which served to really focus a lot of a lot of attention on Kauslow. And as you'll hear in a bit it also had the effect of galvanizing the community around a central question that I think is going to resonate throughout today's webinar both in what I am about to say and what Terry will say in a bit. And that is that it, it galvanized the community around doing an assessment of what its, its most significant assets actually were and are. So the response to the contest was, was astonishing we received hundreds of entrance hundreds of entrance and our finalists were whittled down to four, four clusters of four families I guess three families and an individual, a family of seven from Edmondson, a young couple from Calgary, a family of four from Victoria and young women from San Diego, California. The. Sorry, the slides take a little while to load here. Like a long while. Here we go. So the outcomes of this contest were several. First of all, as I identified earlier, very importantly, this contest galvanized the community and created a sense of community connection. There was a lot of discussion leading up to launching the contest on what the contest should focus on in terms of showcasing Kauslow and his assets. We did a number of a really interesting very easily done kinds of things, including shooting dozens and dozens of very short Instagram videos featuring Kauslow and it's just 10 to 15 minute. Sorry, 10 to 15 second long clips, which each of them, each of them saying something to the effect that I love Kauslow because and then fill in the blanks one of them. One of my personal favorites. I don't know why that slide has come up. It's very attractive, but okay was was a guy coming out of Cootney Lake in the winter. Coming up to the camera and saying, I love Kauslow because I get to walk around in my underwear. These were very popular and they were, they were widely distributed in this case on Instagram. That that initial identification of community strengths were was then celebrated throughout the actual contest when when the winners were actually in town. And the winners, by the way, you see in front of you right now on the front porch of Kauslow's historic city hall. The young couple from Calgary flanking and the red coat and the park on either side. That would be Jean Michel and Rochelle long ball and and then the family from Victoria with their two school aged kids. One of the one of the most market wins from this contest was the fact that the young couple from Calgary immediately went back to their hometown sold their home in Calgary and returned to Kauslow and bought a home. They've now had their first child and have launched a new business. The, the other outflow from the contest is that we, we did this completely focused on social media in part, because we wanted to attract young people who were themselves adept and fluent in social media because we knew that they would become ambassadors not only for the contest itself but subsequently ambassadors for Kauslow and that's certainly proven to be the case. So we already the village of Kauslow is receiving all sorts of inquiries from young people from around Canada and across North America curious about the possibilities of moving here, triggered by this contest. Waiting for the screen to move on to here we go. Oops. Sorry. Okay. So, going back to one of the first things I said, that is the fact that the escape the city contest while it was a fun media savvy, seemingly sort of frivolous exercise was rooted in some very, very important empirical facts. One of them being that it's in our experience almost impossible for a community to successfully launch a new active project without first identifying what its singular unique assets are and you're certainly going to hear that in spades in a moment from Terry talking about their experience in the trail area. So, to, to help with that we've, we've launched another project called first impressions which is a very interesting initiative that helps communities identify what their what their weaknesses are but more importantly what their strengths what their singular assets are. And we've done that with a number of communities. And it's it's interesting because with the assistance of the BC rural center, we bring together two different communities in the same region and help them put together teams that visit their their neighboring communities and do a careful analysis of the strengths and weaknesses in their neighboring communities. Then we share the outcome of those surveys with each community, both online and then through face to face meetings that usually result in actually some concrete action with communities, having now seen through fresh eyes, what their strengths and weaknesses are having a new basis upon which to say okay well let's go forward and let's do x, y or Z. So the final thing that I'll say before handing over the reins to Terry is that another thing that we've noticed and it's really I suppose the main reason why the BC rural center exists is that if there's one thing that most small remote communities in British Columbia share it's a lack of capacity. What I mean by that is that sometimes, for example, tackling the fact that the community is graying that there's an outflow of young people, or the fact that there aren't enough decently paying jobs in the community now that the mill has closed or the mind has closed whatever the case may be. The fact that there isn't a critical mass of affordable innovative housing either rental housing for low income earners or or or decent for purchase housing for young families and perhaps recently retired seniors. Tackling any one of those things can be daunting in many communities because they lack the they lack the capacity to in a substantive way tackle them the same small cluster of volunteers are running from one issue to another sort of plugging plugging holes in the dyke and there are lots of holes in the dyke so the BC rural center is able to come into a community and help help identify all the holes and ideally help plug all of them simultaneously. And so to to help with that kind of effort we're doing a couple of things right now for example that are germane to today's webinar one of them is that we've launched a new initiative that allows us to work with communities who would like to emulate on some level what we did with cows low and the escape the city con contest we can we can be contracted and then work with communities to help them do something similar to that. And we also have a new initiative that focuses on asset based community development or ABCD where we can go in with some world class consultants including our executive director Gordon Borgstrom and work with the community to help them identify their singular unique assets that then they can build a new economic development strategy on one that recognizes that in small communities, everything is interrelated. It's not just about creating new jobs there also has to be adequate housing for the people who work in those jobs. There has to be a workforce to fill those jobs there need to be decent schools. There needs to be a whole range of amenities or attracting young creatives from major urban centers to role places just won't happen. So on that note I'm going to stop and welcome Terry to tell us a bit about the exciting work that she and her colleagues have done in trail. Sorry Terry you're just muted right now are you able to meet yourself I'm not able to do it for you. All right there you go. Thanks Randy I really appreciate your presentations fantastic because trail of course is only a couple hours away from Caslow and my husband's family is from there and still there so I my heart is near and dear to Caslow that's for sure. So for those of you who do not know who I am my name is Terry Van Horn I'm the regional economic development officer for the trail area. And I talk about regional because it is certainly a collaborative approach to economic development taken with five municipalities and two regional districts. The municipalities are the city of trail the city of Rosslyn the I'm kind of trying to work the screen at the same time sorry my apologies. Trail Rosslyn and then the villages of Montrose Fruitvale Warfield and the regional districts of area Cooney Boundary of Area A and Area B so I have seven mayors and 32 counselors as my bosses. So at times it is challenging to come up with regional projects that will be able to support the entire area because every community has its own individuality. But so today I want to talk about two projects very different projects one is actually talking about the creating strategies on a local perspective and then one is creating strategies to attract economic development or workforce or business opportunities on a global scale. So the first strategy I wanted to talk about is the thriving communities metric and that that metric was very strategic we realized 70% of new residents that came to our area actually were visitors first so they visited the trail area and then they came here and said wow it's fabulous. How can we stay and we recognized if we created strategies around educating our local residents when the visitors came here we could share those stories with the visitors and then provide this, you know, a common, common message to visitors about how thriving our communities actually are. And so every month we would publish these really great economic development metrics and the one you see here is about the skill center having 1100 jobs posted in the in the region and so everybody's like wow so I want to stay there must be pretty good jobs here. So we made sure we had the graphic kind of visible on very many different mediums we went and did social media stats and sites we did local billboards. We did company newsletter so we contacted our key companies like tech and alcohol and for us who have very very high number of employees to put it in their monthly newsletters that they send around internally to the employees and so we kept continuously. Taking these metrics every month and then showing them in all different kinds of media to actually subliminally hopefully have people start seeing the same information over and over and all of a sudden they're learning these really neat stats that they could share with anybody that's come to our region. So this one here is about the job posting we and next screen please. And then we also had we use the thriving communities metric to also call it maybe thriving businesses so if there was a business doing something amazing in our area we could also use that as a good news story. And here's when Red Mountain invested $30 million to build the brand new Josie hotel. And so we use that as a good news story so people are all certain starting to see these metrics every month and every different kind of mediums and going wow there's a lot going on in our community I didn't know this was happening. Did you know and now all of a sudden they're sharing those stories and talking at the water cooler and then people come to visit and they start telling the same stories to them. It's interesting because you know there was a lot of discussion about how and what to be able to showcase so making sure that we stayed within you know the something that was tangible that we could actually measure and track and and actually get qualifications up. So it's another really great way to you know collect metrics from economic development perspective and any of you who are attending today that you know are always asked about what what are the metrics in your economy what's happening in your economy you know this is a really great way to collect that information and and top of it be able to advertise that. I did want to make reference to about the graphics in this and you'll see our area is very, very well known for tech metals the it's a the world's largest integrated lead zinc smelter. And so you can see that the rate on the Columbia River and it's you see the tech stacks and then we have a famous three bridge, and then you have the beautiful red mountain attached to that. So making sure you pick a theme that's real to your own your own communities and unique and making sure when you're doing it on a regional perspective trying to keep all of your partners happy at the same time. Next slide please. And so one of the ways we did was that we actually applied for the VC EDA marketing award and we actually created our own thriving communities metric mock up for the award application, which we won we're pretty happy about it but this is a demonstration about how to be able to use it in different ways as well as using it to sell tell good news stories using it to tell good business stories. And then, for example, using it to tell that we want to be CD award. So I have to admit that was a bit of a joke and when they got the application and they saw that we had created our own metric for it. They said that was one of the most innovative ways that any applicant had done for them. Next slide please. So a couple of lessons learned about this. This is kind of the examples of some of the billboards and these billboards were locally and it was specifically very targeted locally again, another medium for our residents to be able to have some of these metrics firsthand so that they can share. And although it's very time consuming to collect the information again going going back to that it is a really great way to be able to use that for reporting efforts as well in the future. It is expensive for a local market so sometimes justifying the expense to your stakeholders for trying to educate the locals was sometimes difficult to justify but it did have success. It really increased the visibility of the actual LCIC office which this initiative started when we were first undertaking initiatives for the Economic Development Office so it actually subliminally or inadvertently did increase our inquiries and they doubled within a year from when we started posting these metrics and the residents started to understand that we what some of the activities that we were trying to undertake so it was very successful. Now I wanted to talk about. So this was more of a local perspective on how to attract get get the locals excited so that when people are coming to our community can share that and then inadvertently attract new people to our region. The next the next thing I wanted to talk about was. And this is some a testimonial from our one of our mayors and they found it very successful and you get the slides so you can read through that. And now the next strategy I want to talk about is the metal tech alley strategy so I want to ensure next slide please I'm sure some of you have heard about the metal tech alley. The metal tech alley is a marketing strategy for a region and this was a very strategic clustered approach to economic development to basically take all of our assets and all of our communities and put it into one sexy brand that we could all talk to. The beautiful thing is is that as a real community and, you know, most of you will relate to this that technology has changed the landscape of how we do business, how all of us do business, whether it's a resource based economy or home based business, whether it's healthcare business is changing through technology. So I felt the technology the metal tech alley was taking them our expertise in the metallurgical landscape and the technology how it's changing all business and creating this sexy name called metal tech alley which is trademarked now. And it's, it tells you very quickly that has something to do with metallurgical or metals and something to do with technology so if anybody knows where trail is we're home to the smelter I talked about that earlier. That is that is what we are known for. And so, instead of trying to pretend to be something we are not and this was not an easy sell to our stakeholders because they wanted. You know they wanted to say well we're about tourism we're in the cooties and you know what about tourism and I kept saying that's great that's fabulous but that's not a different story. And we really quickly realize that unless you tell a different story, you get lost in the the marketing, you know, social media the whole marketing aspect of economic development and metal tech I really was a different way to tell the story. So by taking our expertise in the metallurgical and telling a different story that's positive and and informative and then being able to attract people like minded people that to understand that this expertise is already here. So, one of the things I wanted to be very clear about is, even though we're a regional economic development office, you'll see that trail BC is our locator on our brand, and that was not an easy sell. Our other communities are like well we want to be on the label and we want to be there and, and it was a very strategic decision to ensure that trail is already on the map. So they were able to find trail and they'll specifically be able to understand the metals attachment to trail. And so we needed to use that as our locator so that it already has created an audience instead of trying to, you know, water down the message that we were trying to make. And so we we use trails as a locator but that by no means means that we are not also including all of our surrounding communities. The beautiful thing that all of our region is touched by the metals and the technology sector. So that was a really good way to sell that without the metals and the technology, none of our communities are strong. I really want to emphasize that finding your own identity, finding what you guys do good in your own community is imperative to sell the brand or sell the project or sell the strategy. Because without doing that then you won't get buy in and then it's really hard to sell anything. Next slide please. I wanted to talk about, we have a focus of who you who don't know we are home to one of the world's only lithium ion battery recycling facility, and with electric cars industry going to be continuously advancing technologies. So we're excited to be a global player in the recycling economy in this region. And we already are we do all Tesla's recycling we do all electric batteries get recycled here in trail. So to to to grow that infrastructure and to be able to market that and tell that story that people don't know this kind of global reaches actually happening right here in our in our southeastern part of British Columbia that people just don't even are not even aware. So to talk about technology and innovation we're home to Western Canada's first innovation 4.0 industry hub which is changing technology and industry globally at a rapid pace and we're we're doing it here. These things we're doing here. And one of the interesting part was is that when we started identifying our assets. We realized that we have one of Western Canada's largest service supply chain for industrial companies and it kind of overlooked us but we realized we had every engineering global engineering form has a satellite office or an actual physical location and trail. That's an incredible asset to the region to support that kind of industry and so that was actually wasn't originally originally identified and came out of the stakeholder engagements. So it makes us unique and makes us different and we need to celebrate it and not try to hide behind it because it's industry. There's a way to make industry attractive and environmentally you know tech is a Fortune 100 environmental company that the environmental standards that are coming out of our region. So the leaders telling that story is a way to engage a whole new audience that we haven't been able to engage in the past. So, next slide I just I don't want to go into detail about this to too much but the thought process was that LCIC was in the middle and when we started identifying our assets we started to realize that our companies all had the same target market for the workforce. We really all started when we did all this work at stakeholder work to listen to our businesses about Terry we need workforce we're struggling to have skilled workforce we are very very struggling to find talent. How can you help us and so we also have 100 acres of industrial land which is so unique in the province that's open to industrial investment and open to processes that most of British Columbia. It doesn't even consider or don't doesn't have expertise in so having those 100 and that's acres of 100 100 acres is also an asset and we started realizing that all these companies have the same target market. They had the same the same wants and needs. They needed engineers they needed technologies they need a very high skilled workforce. And I said, you know what what if I went to the business community said if, and so I kind of blew through that but they had the same needs and they weren't doing anything about it because they didn't really have the budget to do it. And I said, you know what if you each gave us the LCIC a little bit of money will take that money and we'll market the region as a whole. Who cares if we attract an engineering student that goes to tech or an engineering professional that goes to a record or would now or an engineering student that went to Austin engineering. We still attracted an engineering person to come to a region and them knowing that there are other options is also very attractive so that they're not thinking gosh there's only one job for me in this area. And we recognize that if we marketed our area as a whole. No matter which company these people came to work for. They're coming to our region. They're bringing highly skilled people with them. And chances are that they are also going to be needing highly skilled jobs. And then we all become stronger together instead of an individual company getting the workforce they need and then not caring about what the rest of the region is doing. By doing this on a clustered approach. I went to the businesses and they gave me money they gave me $400,000 I collect locally for all through the region for business support and I took that money and I went to the rural dividend fund and leverage that into a million dollar project to market the metal tech ally strategies and to attract workforce to do workforce development and workforce attraction as well as business attraction. And so these companies. They are completely bought in they were partners in the project and it has been very successful. Next slide please. I can go in a whole bunch of details about if anybody ever wants to talk in detail about the actual strategies but I wanted to just say that this was a long term plan to be very frank. It took us. Four years of stakeholder engagement engagement foreign direct investment strategies business retention and expansion studies. All of that work was happening in the background for the last four years before we ever got to metal tech alley. And so to be patient and make sure that this is a long term play and all of those other activities had to take place in the background. Before we could truly identify what our assets were and before we could truly get buy in from everybody they were part of the process all the way through. And so to be very clear that having all of those pieces in place, allowed us the, you know, the data and the background to validate what was needed in the area. It wasn't easy and to be very clear we had a lot of times more stakeholders were knocking them on the door going what are you guys doing we haven't seen anything you know it's not sexy it's not visible in the community because we were doing it behind the scenes all the studies and the stakeholder work. And then when we rolled metal tech alley out three years ago, everybody was like, Oh, I get it now. So it's been almost three years since we've rolled it out we've raised $2 million in the last three years it's actually for four years so by the end of next year it'll be $2 million. Our inquiries have doubled in the past year we're up to you know we started with a, you know, single double digits and we're up to thousands of inquiries that we're handling a year it's it's exhausting but it's amazing. We've got 19 new jobs locally created nine new companies have relocated to the region. We have $5 million increased revenues for the region and not only is that for the actual businesses that are coming into the region but it's also for this other the service industries now had their workforce increase because the accountants and lawyers and those kind of professional services to support the new business that's been attracted their revenues are going up so it's kind of this snowball effect of more more business and more needs being needed. The visibility from the provincial scale and the national scale has been amazing I've had a lot of opportunity to speak on this process and speak about the validity of a clustered approach to economic development the partnerships with the private sector is really really drive strategies like that. And then of course, having provincial support and it's been amazing the world of it and find has been instrumental in in the success of mental tech alley I cannot say enough about that. The belief they had in the this project and the belief in the value of supporting it could bring to our community. We, we've had many ministerial visits since then going, oh my goodness I had no idea this was going on in our very own backyard. How can we help support you and that really was the key that targeting our government officials to know about it was a very strategic we purposely were reaching out to every ministry saying hey did you know so that they can share our story. The more we can educate our leaders in our province in our country to talk about this story. This year is to spread this, the message so that was very strategic by partnering with our provincial ministries. We have I foresee innovation center that I talked about the industry 4.0 innovation hub they're actually part of the digital super customer one of the only real part of the BC digital digital super customer. And we open, we won a couple of words recently this year about the BCDA community impact ward and the open for business award. And finally, some lessons learned next slide please. It doesn't happen overnight I talked about taking four years collaboration was key, especially with the private sector as well as of course your support organizations. Educating the businesses and the partners and the local leaders to tell the stories imperative because we don't have the money to, you know, to be able to do a full blown marketing campaign. You know, and so to be able to tell people as much as possible and provide them with the collateral they need to tell the story for us. The problem sustainability. I can't see the rule given a fun fun, you know, sponsoring this forever and supporting this forever so we better come up with the sustainability plan that's part of our real dividend fund this year, and the beginning of next in a way to keep a value proposition for all of our businesses to buy in to understand that even if this is tied to the metals and technology sector that all businesses are actually going to, you know, improve and all boats flow and creating a value proposition that they are willing to pay into to continue this momentum will be imperative. Interesting. My friend told me this and I didn't believe her but she's my colleague and she helped me through this process in the last four or five years and she said Terry if you build it, they will come if it's sexy and interested in different. They will come and they have come be entrepreneurial and passionate and don't be afraid if you if something doesn't go the way you want make sure you pivot no matter how good you think it is and go on and, and do something different, but be passionate about it and make sure that you, you are open and share that and people will want to be part of it. And exactly like Randy talked about at the end of his presentation was about with success comes other economic infrastructures to consider housing infrastructure all those kinds of assets that make make a new person new resident new business strong and healthy you have to have all those other infrastructure in place to support that. And so we are realizing now that we have to basically go back and rethink about other infrastructure economic development infrastructure to support this growth. With that, I'm happy to answer questions and talk more and more detail, but I'll turn it back over to Jessica now and I wait for questions. Thank you so much for that. Terry and Randy both if anyone has any questions now for our panelists, please feel free to use your control panel to put up your hand or if you'd like to type of your question into your question panel. I know I have one question for you both. You've both been successful and you both talked about the need to plan for your successes. What's the kind of one thing that you wish you had known about before you started your campaign. I wish I would have known how long of a process was, you know, it, you don't realize that it's really good work being done but it does take time and, and rolling it out and seeing the successes will take time and a lot of times, investment in economic development is short term and then you get you get momentum happening and and trying to find funding is is is very difficult for an economic development function and trying to demonstrate that you're making progress even though it's not visible at the time. I wish I'd known that ahead of time. The patient sounds like a key. Yeah. I think in my case, I wish I'd known just how interested tons of young created families actually are who are currently living in big cities and moving to a small place. I'm not really listening to Terry because I think our listeners tuning into this webinar can see that there's obviously a significant structural difference between a region like the region around trail and a truly remote small individual municipality like with no, no industrial advantage, like tech certainly represents or a big ski resort like Red Mountain. So what we didn't fully appreciate, this is all good news not bad news, what we do now in part because of some subsequent work the BC rural centers done with with a fellow named Zachary manheimer who's based in Iowa, who's probably leading an expert on how remote truly remote small communities can attract young urban creatives. We discovered that and have created actually a list of the top 13 reasons why young creative urban types will actually consider moving to a truly remote community like Caswell. And there are of course hundreds of truly remote small communities like Caswell across the province number one on the list, cultural amenities. Number two on the list, high speed internet. Number three on the list Terry will appreciate this and entrepreneurial culture. Number four on the list restaurants and a critical mass of shops and number five on the list my personal favorite micro breweries. Number six on the list innovative housing notice that word innovative not necessarily solely affordable but innovative housing. Number 13 on the list of 13 items and remember, this is a list of items that are germane, not to not to a rural community like trail and the area around it, but to a truly remote small community like Caswell. Number 13 last on the list jobs. The reason is that the kinds of folks that we were attracting through escape the city, bring their jobs with them. But then item number two on the list has to be present high speed internet. But we know that we're much better positioned to, to help other small remote communities like Caswell fashion a campaign that's truly going to be effective. And if they lack some of those items on that list, help them make something happen on those fronts. Very interesting. And what what would you guys say both of you talked about your kind of your communities unique assets, whether it's cultural or industrial. How, how should communities go forward to identify what those assets are if they don't already know. I think our biggest best with stakeholder engagement so, and it wasn't just the business community was, it was a broad, it was a broad range of stakeholder engagements and so engaging the private public sector as well as your elected officials, making sure you had a really robust people sitting around the table and just and, and big box skying it and making sure that you list everything, and then start to pick out you know the low hanging fruit ones that you know piggyback potentially and then pick on something that will be able to really move your community forward. And in our case the process was quite informal. This is a very small community of fewer than 1000 people so almost everything that happens in a, in a village the size of Caswell is informal. Just conversations of coffee shops meeting with the village Mayor and Council meeting with the Chamber and its board and having having conversations over coffee about what, what are the, the singular unique assets that that identify Caswell and what the community came up with were two things number one culture. Caswell is, and the region around Caswell the North Kootenai Lake region is home to a an astonishing number of world class writers musicians artists actors filmmakers. This is the home of, according to USA today one of the world's 10 best places to listen to outdoor music the Caswell jazz festival. The fiber asset that was identified as communications. Caswell is home to a community based fiber optic enabled ISP called Caswell infinite. It's the world's smallest fiber enabled community controlled ISP. This 127 year old building that I'm speaking from you there to you from today, we have access to gigabyte community control bandwidth. So that combination in the case of Caswell was identified as its greatest singular asset, and it's big differentiator community cultural strengths. So we've started calling Caswell the community cultural capital of rural British Columbia, and a branding campaign can be built around that. And now, from the BC rural centers perspective, we're taking that informal process that I just described in the case of Caswell and the escape the city contest approach and taking it to a more formal structured place. Launching asset based community development initiatives working collaboratively with communities in a more organized way to help them identify their singular assets. Great. We just have one time for one more question we had a question that came from the audience for Terry. How did the regional initiative come together is it common in rural region. Is this common in rural regions and how do we encourage our municipalities and districts to come together in the context of attraction and recruitment. So the first part of the question was, how did the regional economic development office come about in terms of. Well, it started with a regional economic development office right so all of the municipalities pay into our function. So the five municipalities I mentioned as well as the area. And they all pay into the L C I C economic development, regional economic development function based on population and taxation. And so they have and have no, and I'm governed by a board of business professionals with no stakeholders on the board. The board is absolutely driven by the business business sector in our region. And so that has allowed us some autonomy to be innovative and creative because as anybody knows that businesses do not see boundaries or borders. You know, it's a global reach and so having an economic development function that was already a regional function and then clustering all of our assets in the entire region to create a strategy that everybody could buy into had to make sure that it was attached to something that everybody was dependent on. And everybody in our region like Randy said and like those results from Randy saying technology and access to technology broadband was imperative and all of us are touched by both the metallurgical and the technology sectors. There's nobody in our region that is not tied to tech in one way or another. If they're doctors and nurses that hospital is here because of tech. If they're service industries they're here because they need to serve the residents that are working at tech. So finding a way for all everybody tied to is imperative to be able to drive a brand on a on a regional scale for sure. Did that answer your question. What was the other part of it. It is how do we encourage our municipalities and districts to come together and economic development. Yeah. Yeah, and that's a really great question. I from a rural perspective and definitely not as small as Randy, but our municipalities recognize that nobody had a budget for an economic development officer they tried to have an economic development office. Officer out of like the regional district or the city of trail. And that didn't work. That didn't work because they didn't get buying from the surrounding communities because that individual was focused on the individual region that are community that provided their income and employed them. And they realized they couldn't afford to have have a specific economic development function. But if they worked together collaboratively and if they all agreed to pay in a function collaboratively that they could collaboratively have an economic development officer to drive the entire region. And in fact, it was understanding that those other regions actually added value to our community, not one of them really. They're all very different and that actually makes the region a much more attractive. You take a region like Fruitvale. They have the most incredible rural properties and opportunities in real. In our rural region, they service that Montrose is this bedroom community has incredible family housing and family support. And Rosin has this, you know, medical professionals and entrepreneurial culture and red mountain service workers. So they're all very, very different communities, but they all actually attribute to a greater, a greater asset as a whole. And so by having them pick one thing, it might not be an economic development office. That might be way too big. But what I would recommend is getting them in a room and picking a project that they all could pay into to do together and start that kind of trusted and building relationship on a project that would be successful to all the communities and then lead into an economic development function. Awesome. I think we are just about out of time here. It's just about two minutes to 11. So thank you both so much for participating and sharing your stories with our group today. One other person had asked if Randy, if you're able to share that list of assets to for young urban entrepreneurs. So is that posted somewhere on the rural site or it is indeed if if that person would like to get in touch with me. Anyone listening would like to get in touch with us. My email is Randy at BC rural center.org. I'd be delighted to hear from you and I'd be happy to send you that link. Of course. Terry T Van Horn at metal tech alley.com. So, if you have a similar story that you to either what you heard today, we'd love to feature you in our BC idea ideas exchange success stories. So you can do that by emailing us at economic development. Or you can ask to be contacted in the survey. It's going to come up in the next. Please, if you're not already subscribed to our webinars, please do that by the link on our website. We have an interesting webinar coming up next month, which is going to include information about tariffs and tax free trade agreements. A lot of people are looking to diversify their exports. So the folks from the international trade group will be sharing information about how to learn more about international trade. And then if you have any suggestions or any ideas for other webinars that you'd like to hear or topics that you'd like information on, please let us know at that email that I mentioned earlier. And the webinar invitations are available if you want to share this with anyone who's interested in our, in our, in the, in these types of topics, but they're not already tuning in. That would be great. The short link is just www.pm.pn slash three I and J. And you'll just include some information, including your job title and your organization, just so that we're aware of the people that we are chatting with. So that is all from us today. You'll receive a survey tomorrow and we do appreciate that feedback so that that can tie into our future webinars. And this recording will be posted on our past webinar site in the next week or so. So if you want to go back and catch some information that you might have missed, or you'd like to share it with anyone else, look on our website in about a week. Thank you all for joining in and a special thanks to Terry and Randy for sharing their information with the group. Thanks Jessica. Thanks everyone. Bye.