 Broadcast is now starting. All attendees are in listen-only mode. Welcome back everyone or to our first-time participants. Welcome to the economic development webinar series. My name is Ben Kennedy. I'm with the Regional Programs and Engagement Branch of the Ministry of Jobs Traded Technology and I'll be facilitating today's webinar. I'm located in Victoria, BC on the unceded Coast Salish Territory of the Lekwungen people known today as the Esquimal and Songhees First Nations. Today's webinar is on community economic development and how the principles it follows can help your communities build resiliency to the ups and downs of economic change. But first just some housekeeping. On your attendee control panel you'll see the orange arrow lets you shrink the panel to the side of the screen. It automatically shrinks if you don't do anything for a while. Below that the orange microphone shows that you're muted. That is fixed to mute for this webinar. While the blue box lets you expand the whole webinar interface to full screen. Below that the little hand can be clicked to notify me that you want to speak but because there are many of you the best way to raise a question is to enter your question in the questions box in your control panel and I'll ask it for you either during the presentation or at the end. If we don't get to all of your questions I will try to get you an answer via email after the webinar is finished. Finally you have two options for connecting to audio via your computer over VoIP or by phoning in. If you click on phone call it will give you a phone number to call with an access code to this webinar and a personal identification number for you individually. As a reminder this session is being recorded and the presentation slides will be made available through our web pages noted on the screen. Okay that's it so let's get to it. Our presentation today is an overview of community economic development what it is and how in a time of increasing economic and environmental change you can incorporate it into your economic development efforts to build resiliency for your community. I will be attended today by my colleague Alex Zachinuk who will be giving us a sneak peek at some results from the 2018 local economic development survey and providing some tips for how you can use data from it to inform your decision making but before that I'd like to introduce our speaker Jeremy Stone. Jeremy has over 17 years of community economic development experience throughout North America and internationally. His career has included non-profit lending to historically marginalized entrepreneurs, community economic development planning with rural and urban communities and extensive small business technical assistance and consulting. He's also a leader in economic resilience and has worked on various disaster recoveries including Hurricane Katrina, the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, the economic recovery of Lower Manhattan after 9-11 and the 2013 Colorado floods. Jeremy is currently the director of the community economic development program at Simon Frazier University and is completing a PhD in community and regional planning at the University of British Columbia. Jeremy Stone thanks for coming to speak with us today. Let me. Thanks so much. Give you control. All right. Are we good to go? Good to go. All right. So welcome everyone. Thanks for joining us today. So today I'll be speaking about resilience and community economic development and how they work together. So just to give a little bit of background on me and the program here, the Simon Frazier University community economic development program has been around for 30 years, started in 1989 and it's worked with hundreds and hundreds of practitioners across Western Canada. Currently we're housed in the faculty environment and we take a really quadruple bottom line focus, bringing together economy, social equity, environment, and cultural appropriateness into our work. Me, you've heard a little bit about my bio. I've been doing this for about 18 years now and the big thing I think for today's purposes that besides the background in community economic development that whole time, I've also been doing disaster recovery in multiple contexts. Hurricane Katrina, Hurricane Harvey, Colorado floods and many others started with 9-11 a long time ago and so over time have really seen how community economic development and economic resilience can work together. Just a quick overview of what we do here if you're ever interested. We have a certificate program for professionals who do economic development or want to integrate community economic development into their other practices. We have lots of government leaders who take the certificate and then use it in their their daily work. We also have a social economy accelerator where we usually partner with organizations like Community Futures and then provide startup programming for local entrepreneurs. And then we also have our community economic resilience work where we do planning and workshops with communities locally to help them figure out how to do their economic resilience planning. We've also been doing a lot of research lately, recently have been collaborating with the Ministry of Forest Lands Natural Resource Operations and Rural Development to help them think through community economic development nationally and what could be applied here in the province. So today we'll be going through a few different areas. One is just framing what community economic development and resilience is all about, then followed by some cases and then looking more specifically at planning. So first just to iterate the risks, you know every single presentation on anything disaster related has to start with the big scary slide. So this is your big scary slide for today. Basically you know the number of disasters have been increasing over time and I think what's interesting about this the right side of the slide is just noting how many losses are uninsured. There's just a lot of losses that are happening that are not covered by typical funding schemes and so we have to be thinking about well what do we do in society to deal with all of these people who are not protected in some way financially. There's lots of other ways that they're not protected as well but you know I think that there's a large gap there that we still have to focus on and part of that is you know improving the insurance industry etc but part of it is really improving the way that we deliver services. Here in DC as you can see on the left you know just in the 2017 season between floods and wildfires you know all of those dots and there are communities that were impacted or areas that had some sort of fire and clearly you know there's a need in our province to be concerned about not only resilience in general but especially economic resilience. So a few things you know sometimes people are critical of being involved in the economy because they say that you know businesses take care of themselves and that we should be really focused on people and not businesses but you know to me that's wrong. Really we we have a really big need to focus on businesses and there are some clear reasons why you know the first is that the majority of our critical life needs are provided by businesses. When you leave your home every day the majority of what you get from the outside world is provided by businesses food clothing medicine even the home that you live in was built by contractors usually that were in the private sector you know the majority of what we get access to the private businesses provide so we need to bring them online as soon as possible after a disaster. Secondly after evacuations in particular businesses are the beacons of recovery we've seen that in Fort Mac and New Orleans and other places where when you completely shut down town or a large portion of the town and people leave when they come back they're going to look for those critical lifelines is my job back is the grocery store back is the pharmacy back and if those things are back they're going to go back to where they're staying and waited out and this is especially critical when you're looking at a disaster that happens and say you know July or August because if the new school year starts and those people are are gone then you know they'll enroll their kids locally in those other communities and they might not ever come back so you know it's very critical to bring businesses back online as quickly as possible so that people can just live their daily lives businesses provide incomes goods and services for the individual recoveries so you know when people are trying to rebuild their houses or trying to you know just get their lives back on track they need businesses to pay them income so that then they can spend it on their personal recovery they need to buy goods and services from businesses so if we want our communities to come back more rapidly we need businesses to be there to support them and then finally local businesses are accountable to the community and they reduce capital leakage there's two points here one is that you know after Katrina especially we saw tons and tons of contract or fraud and and what happens in all disasters is that when something goes haywire you'll often have lots of people in vans come from out of town or out of province and they will you know start trying to provide goods and services some of them are really great but some of them end up taking people's money and taking off or they provide really poorer services or provide a shoddy work and then they can't be found afterwards so the more that we work with local businesses the more accountable they are and they can be tracked down if anything goes wrong but usually they're also really invested in doing a good job for the community the second part of that is reducing capital leakage so this refers to the notion that when you spend money locally into local businesses a larger percentage of that money stays in the community it's usually a ratio of anywhere from three to one to five to one to ten to one depending on the business and so you know people need money after disasters to be able to do all these things and if you're putting money into chain stores or putting money into out of area businesses then a lot of that money leaves just when people need it the most so trying to support local businesses you know has a revolving effect that supports local economies and recovery and then finally you know definitely finally this time businesses need support and capacity too the the notion that businesses take care of themselves and that they're okay just because they make income is wrong generally businesses are going through twin tragedies they're dealing with both the loss of like a home or loss of loved ones or you know personal trauma and then also the loss of their business or you know some sort of business related trauma so between the two you know business owners are under a great deal of stress and they generally don't have a lot of capacity especially small business owners you know they're always really focused on just trying to make a business run they don't necessarily know how to navigate bureaucracies and get access to capital in these times of need so they need support and help and and usually the only folks who could do that are non-profit organizations government etc so the the big point I think for for this talk is really how economic development and economic recovery and resilience actually work together. Judith Rodin from the Rockefeller Foundation who's been involved in the 100 resilient cities they've been doing work all over the world in this field you know her argument is that when you're investing into resilience you have benefits in the short term because a lot of times what you're doing for economic resilience like economic diversification and workforce support etc that all has short term impacts that grows the economy in the meantime and then in case of disaster there are these you know sort of unintended consequences that you're more resilient and so focusing on embedding resilience into your daily economic development has both short term and long term returns. So you know some of you may not be more familiar with community economic development but you know CED has a lot of different definitions this is the one that I like the most CED is a systems approach to problem solving for community well-being now you know to break that down you know first problem solving businesses and entrepreneurs are really problem solvers it's not just that they sell things it's that they're figuring out how to solve the problems of people locally people need access to grain they need access to clothes they need access to this or that and so business owners and entrepreneurs are figuring out huh I bet I can get that and I can sell that and make a living in the process so you know economic systems are constantly problem solving for us and CED says well it's not just you know jobs and an income that promotes that but it's a whole systemic approach it's the entire society and community and how we sort of work on things like housing or work on education and other things to bring those together and improve community well-being through the process. Some of the principles of CED include being livelihoods focused so not just looking at you know 40 hour a week jobs but looking at the whole continuum of how people you know create their livelihoods and sometimes that's just small business opportunities or you know informal trade etc diverse and inclusive making sure that everyone in the community is included so you know when we do our economic development planning that we're actually looking at folks with barriers or people who have been traditionally marginalized sustainability so making sure that not only that our economy is financially sustainable but also environmentally sustainable and culturally appropriate for for all people who live in that community. Place-based really working off the strengths of a community and the assets in this way it's really set opposed to attraction strategies most often doesn't mean that you can't do attraction strategies when you're doing community economic development but there has to be more focus on well how do we actually work with the assets we have how do we build and grow local businesses how do we spend into local businesses to keep that vibrant and then finally community controlled you know making sure that the economy and the planning for it and whatnot is done by the community so that it represents community interests and community desires. Some examples of community economic development include business retention and expansion so a lot of the work that community futures do across the province in supporting local businesses and growing them social enterprise and innovation creating businesses their focus not just on financial returns but also social and environmental returns by local programs social procurement programs you know in Nelson they have a pretty great social procurement policy you know making sure that the local businesses are supported whenever we're buying and then finally you know and this is not the the only things that are part of community economic development but the final example is just you know community-based financing there's a lot of great work that's being done by Eden Yesh and others on community investment co-ops trying to find how we can you know better pool local money to support local business. So bringing all these ideas together both the community economic development and the resilience I'd like to talk about this as community economic resilience so you know maintaining our well-being while adjusting to constant changes in the world around us. Changes may be you know very stark like a forest fire and a flood but they can be things that happen not just in a disaster context like mill closures or other factory closures or they can be things that happen over time as you know pine beetle spreads in areas or economic downturns in you know small town downtowns all of these are are different changes and the goal is is how can we accept those changes and whether those changes while still having our same level of well-being you know how can we keep a level of happiness and security through all these changes. So to explain what I mean by this a little bit more we'll look at a few cases from around the province and then also North America more generally and talk about how people integrate community economic development and resilience or use community economic development to contribute to resilience. So first example is Fogo Island in Newfoundland. What's interesting about Fogo Island is that they were predominantly fishing based community for you know a century and then and then they started to see the beginnings of a downturn and they developed a foundation called the shore fast foundation that started to not only invest locally but then buy up assets and convert them and build more diversification. So you know a couple of things that they did that were interesting was one they started making sure that all of these social enterprises that they were starting were all connected to each other so that all of the furniture that's in their their hotel is crafted by local artisans who are in a you know furniture based cooperative and so all of these different businesses work together support each other support each other then they also have these things like the economic nutrition label where they try to communicate very directly to consumers and local community of how much money they're really putting back in locally. So in this case if you can see the small writing of Fogo Island you know 63 percent of their economic benefits go back there seven percent so Newfoundland more generally Canada more generally 24 percent etc and so you know two things are happening here one is that they're educating their local community to buy local to support you know the community businesses to develop more community based businesses but then also they've created some real buffers to variations in the fishing industry and and as that has collapsed more fully they've been able to to weather that and and be able to have a healthy economy despite it. Here in BC Checumus Community Forest just outside of Whistler it's a really interesting example because what they did here was you know create a community forest it was you know public private partnership in that senior levels of government devolved the forest control to the local community they developed an organization to manage that and then even though they still continue to have cuts in the forest they've reduced those cuts and started investing into other types of businesses so one is the the tourism side so they developed this beautiful center that is used for all kinds of events they've put in more programming into the forest to bring people in to use it but then they've also started using carpet offsets as a way to monetize the forest without cutting it down so they were able to sell those offsets on the market. It's a kind of a complicated approach and it's not one that's necessarily going to work in every community but what is interesting about it is that they reduced the reliance on the forestry aspect of the forest were able to diversify and what's also cool about this is just looking at the the structure itself that they built for the center it's raised it's very sensible to the flood plain so that it's right on the banks of a river so that if there is flooding that asset doesn't get impacted they're still able to you know to reuse it in the future so you know this is a really great example of development that is you know sensitive to potential disaster but then is also diversifying and being very community focused. Kanaka Bar Band is a very interesting example also from here in BC what if you hear the the stories they tell it they have a really great description on the website and I encourage you to go check it out but you know they basically found that by the 70s and 80s the toll of colonialism had really you know run a deep course and you know they said we want to be able to to be self-sufficient and self-reliant and and so they started focusing on local planning to take over you know local assets and resources and build a really you know sustainable and resilient economy and society and so they started doing that over the course of 20 30 years now they've you know bought up a number of assets locally a gravel pit they got access to the the water supply there have been doing a lot of really interesting business developments around those things and and and have also focused on education and employment so now you know recently there was an interview where they had you know mentioned that they had 100% employment now and 100% graduation rate for band members and you know well another interesting part of this is now they've turned their eye towards climate change and they've said you know we believe in climate change we're going to prepare for it and so they've taken the same approach to their you know asset assessment early on in their community economic development work and saying well what do we have locally that we can build on and have translated that into a vulnerability assessment and so now they're assessing well how do we actually you know identify what our vulnerabilities are how do we contribute back to you know plugging those vulnerabilities and making us more resilient and and I'm really excited to see where they go with this but I think just the the planning aspect of it alone is really inspiring by local campaigns they're a real favorite of mine not everybody's is into them as others but you know I think that just a constant education of of local people around buying locally is important after the Joplin tornado in Missouri the the city was devastated it ripped through town as you can see in that impact path map and most of that was down through their commercial corridor and so they had 485 businesses that were impacted and what was great about them is that they immediately went into action so the mayor and chamber of commerce got out there started messaging you know you have to shop locally you have to shop Joplin because we need that money to stay locally right now and and then they you know developed signs of there were big green signs that they would put in front of any business because all the businesses sort of looked the same whether you were open or closed it all looked really ragged so all the ones that were open they created the signs they put them out front they were like hey open for business it was very bright and attractive and and they just got going and and that's turned into a longer term you know by local campaign and what was was interesting is that you know they had a ton of businesses reopen the majority of their businesses reopen and then they had new businesses even come out of that and you know statistically speaking that bucked every trend you know the the majority of the you know areas that are impacted by disaster show that maybe 25 to half of your businesses come back you know many go out of business either right away or within the first two years it's it's a pretty bad scenario in most cases for a catastrophic disaster so for them to have such a great recovery is just outstanding and I think this example shows both you know how you know a by local campaign could be repurposed for a you know local resilience campaign but then also how you know it can a disaster like this can bring people together and sort of chart them on a localism path that will sustain the economy in the future. Another good example of of community futures work especially is here in in BC following the 2017 fires you know the caribou region those CFs started working to bring financial assistance to the local community and and you know they were very flexible in their financing they had you know low cost financing they had one page applications it was very simple and straightforward and then when they got it out to the community people you know it wasn't just their borrowers who were allowed to borrow they were allowed other businesses to come and borrow and even if people had poor credit they worked with them to to still get access to financing they just had to rejig some of the the requirements overall I think they're you know two or three great lessons out of this you know one is that the existing flexible financing from a community economic development perspective was already in place that infrastructure was there for rapid response after disaster and if you know anything about you know recovery financing in the province or just really in North America more generally outside sources take a long time it'll often take six months or nine months or even a year many of the people in the caribou region had been facing you know insurance payout delays some up to 14 months so being able to have you know a lender that exists that already does you know on the ground you know like a sort of character based lending or you know enough of that technical assistance around lending that banks normally can't do you know that already builds up a local economy to be more resilient but then after a disaster you know there are those opportunities to you know sort of change direction focus more on recovery financing and support businesses that have been impacted. One last note on this one is that the the CFs and this isn't just in the caribou you know also Grand Forks Community Futures Boundary did the same thing but you know they worked really hard on restructuring loans giving interest holidays you know payment holidays that sort of thing so that businesses were able to to have sort of a breather during this time and not all banks can do that and it's great to see when both banks and you know non-profit institutions etc are able to to fill that gap. Heading back to New Orleans I'm originally from the Gulf Coast and I've spent a lot of time there and also we have a lot of disasters down there so we've gotten pretty good at some of this but there's two last examples that I'll just draw from my work there that I think really translates anywhere. One is the New Orleans Office of Workforce Development and what's really interesting about them is that they spend a lot of time working with people with barriers working with people coming you know through public assistance and trying to you know connect them to job opportunities. Now one of the the interesting parts about this is that whenever they hold a job fair for for anyone for regular jobs they keep a list of people and they always ask them are you available to work after a disaster because they found that those people who are going through their offices are usually the first ones displaced you know they're low skilled labor they're they usually don't have a lot of job opportunities and so you know they always ask them are you available to work in case there's a disaster they keep a database of those names and then when something happens and it invariably does but when something does happen then they have that list to draw upon so usually the first people to call are the the parks department because they need people doing debris removal so they start calling all the people on the list and saying hey are you around to do debris removal and they start bringing those people over but they also have outside businesses who call and say hey you know we're looking for 10 people to join a job site or this or that and so they're able to start connecting those people to jobs it's a very simple action to maintain that list but it has profound impacts because if people are going to be out of work for a month or two months or six months especially those who are on the margins of income stability you know that's that has a huge impact for them so you know I really like this approach and then finally the southeast Louisiana fisheries assistant center this was something that I worked on gosh 13 14 years ago now and so that's my little fresh face in the back the tall guy on the right and you know what we found was that when we were responding to the recovery that the fishermen especially they were impacted in ways that like other people weren't necessarily so they have a lot of different needs from lots of different agencies so permitting and licensing agencies in in the state capital and then banks that might be in another area and then Red Cross and other folks were in different areas and and we just found that a lot of people didn't know all the resources that were out there they had a lot of needs that were going unmet so we worked together with state and federal leaders we brought together a good amount of money and we got a free trailer from the local parish and then we put it all together and started the center and it was a one-stop shop for people to come through they were able to get access to all forms of of assistance all the agencies were co-located and and not only was this good for that disaster but then we just kept it afterwards so then that became a hub for all commercial fishermen to come back to and get access to resources for you know just their daily business needs and then when the BP oil spill happened they already knew where to go and and so they all just came back and then we started doing you know grant processing and loan processing and all kinds of other services so you know I think it's a really great example of how you know creating hubs for small business or for you know business retention expansion those can be used as your your you know points of of connection to communities during disaster and and again it's that blend of the economic development and community economic resilience so finally I'd like to talk a little bit about planning I noticed on the invite list that there were a lot of folks who you know are coming from local governments and whatnot so you know I think the the first thing I always hear when I talk about this stuff is wow we can't do that it's too expensive you know we don't have the staff for it and I completely feel your pain I get it but I think that there are lots of ways to do this that are cheaper and that are incremental in nature so the the first place to start is to just think well how do our plans support economic resilience generally people have you know communities have economic development strategies or economic development plans and and even they have emergency management plans but it's rare that any of those plans have anything to do with resilience or have resilience incorporated or you know economic resilience in particular in the emergency management plans so an example of this is some work I did after the Colorado floods we went and visited 25 communities we developed like this 52-point matrix where we looked at every single plan and then economic development plan and then had all their other plans from that community and we sort of surveyed the whole thing and we looked them from the perspective of research and knowledge building for resilience do they have recovery planning embedded do they have governance structures like a connection to emergency management in their economic development plans etc and and we knew what the results would be and they came back pretty much as expected those blue bars are not observed in the plans the majority of what we were looking for was just not there and and we went back and did interviews afterward with all of these communities and asked them specifically about their plans and said you know we didn't see any of this in there was it somewhere else is it like you know just common knowledge between you that you don't have written down and they said no that's pretty accurate you know we haven't been thinking about that stuff or if they have been thinking about it they haven't gotten to the level planning yet and and so this you know this is potentially problematic but it's also an opportunity where we can start thinking about well how do we embed some of these concepts into our plans if you think it's just Colorado last year last year we did a piece well we did a little review of plans in the Kootenai area not to pick on the Kootenai at all but I just happened to be going there and I looked at a lot of local plans and and it had the same same effect you know there are just a lot of things that are not observed so this isn't something that's like bad like people haven't you know caught on and they're behind it's just that we haven't gotten to this point yet where we've really started realizing how we can embed this in our planning and so I think you know some of the work that we're doing at the CED program and that the province is doing you know especially at the ministry level is trying to think of well how do we actually connect these things together so one way to to start thinking about this is a whole community approach the whole community approach has you know made it pretty big in the states FEMA has adopted this approach and it's also been started to be adopted here in Canada but the whole idea is you know government is not completely responsible for disasters and businesses aren't completely responsible for economic recovery there's a whole group of people in the community who own little bits and pieces and who can contribute little bits and pieces so like colleges and universities they have business programs where there are lots of faculty and staff and students who can support you know planning processes they can support information gathering from the community they can even implement some of the technical assistance programming on the back end emergency managers have a role to play just in coordinating their activities with the private sector the business technical assistance providers like community futures like other nonprofit organizations have a real strong role to play chambers of commerce in both representing business interests but also pushing out information and organizing businesses financial institutions developing products that are appropriate for you know emergency management and recovery making sure that money is flexible that is already out there so that you know repayment plans can actually weather these disruptions other nonprofits and associations so you know I teach a course at Tulane on economic recovery and the the one thing that I have all my students do because they're mostly social work students so they have nothing to do with economic development or recovery but I talked to them about well what are you know have take a local nonprofit and write an economic resilience plan from their point of view so it could be an association of food workers or it could be an immigrant association lgbt you know any kind of organization all of those organizations have businesses in their communities that are important to them that perhaps they represent or they liaise with all of them can do really great case management with those businesses they can be set up after a disaster to have their own little plans to focus on okay well all of our lgbt serving businesses we're going to reach out to them and make sure that they get access to support or you know all of the you know tourism-based businesses or you know local you know food-based businesses we're just going to work in our lanes and so you know I think it's really important to rely on those organizations to provide support services and do that case management individual residents all have a role you know there's a lot of volunteerism that can be done but I think it's also just motivating them to buy locally and support their local businesses and then you know finally labor unions other labor organizations anything that represents the workforce is really critical to involve so a couple of examples of planning one that I think is really great and it's catching on it's something that we're doing now at Simon Fraser is to is this resilient bill approach that they started doing in San Francisco and what they did was bring together sort of the community development community economic development strategies with resilience and say well how do we do you know place-based resilience planning and so really looking at what are the local assets what do we rely on in all these different areas and then what do we what do we do with the gaps you know what are the vulnerabilities there and so they'll bring together all these community members go through a mapping process talk it through of like well what does you know like what do we want like what businesses do we need to return what sort of development do we need to do in the short term so like fill the gaps but then after disaster what are we going to do if we have gaps remaining and so it's a really great approach that's catching on kind of globally at this point I know they're doing some in Battersea in England and then doing it in Vancouver so you know it's been a pretty great approach. A more local version is in Port Coquitlam I like to use this photo of Tara Stroop she's the one of the emergency managers in Port Coquitlam and she's a really amazing person and I think this kind of Photoshopped image that they have out there is great of her because because really she's in some ways single-handedly move forward the process of preparation for economic recovery or economic resilience and and she just realized at some point as she was doing some educational work that they didn't have a lot for recovery planning and so so the first thing that she did especially in the business sector was to go out and do a survey and just find out like are you prepared for a disaster you know do you have insurance do you have these supports etc and once she got more information she knew a little bit more about the gaps she went back out and did these discovery sessions where they would bring together business owners and sort of vet what they had heard from the surveys then they started doing once they got an idea from the business owners of what they wanted then they started doing continuity planning workshops where they would go through different aspects like you know what do you do in case of utility loss or what do you do in case of insurance etc and and then finally you know she started bringing in you know bigger players to sort of give their case study approaches so she brought in the Walmart emergency operation center they carry on a 24-hour day 365 day year emergency operation centers for their communities all across North America and she brought in others to to sort of explain like how they go about dealing with economic resilience all of this has been done on a shoestring budget almost all the people that she's had involved have been working on a volunteer basis they have gotten some pieces of money here and there to fund it but you know I think it's a really great example of a the shoestringing of this kind of work and then b just the fact that you can have one local champion who picks this up and carries it forward she's been recognized by UBCM and others for this work and you know I just think that if we could sort of replicate this model in other parts of the province you know there would be a real strengthening of economic resilience so takeaways you know there's a few sets of takeaways I have here one is to learn and work incrementally I always encourage people to either establish or commandeer a regular meeting group or round table you know like get a task force together and it doesn't have to be from scratch it could be some group that already exists but just infiltrate that group and then start you know promoting this message and get people to start focusing on learning and planning you know one good thing is to collaborate with partners to do some low-cost research so collaborate with local universities or local nonprofits try to get out there and have them do some surveys on your behalf or do some you know ground-true thing find out what your vulnerabilities are the opportunities the gaps and and then once you get all that research together make a list I mean to me it's really simple as that if you can make a list for for like all these possibilities then you can hopefully you know move forward and and develop an approach running low on batteries I apologize if it's a problem and then the finally once you make that list support the execution of the list and and I think the the the point here is to support it it's not that any of you have to actually execute the list on your own but support bringing that whole community together to talk about these issues so the next takeaway is to just re-purpose assets to reduce costs and time there's a ton of stuff out there that already exists call centers and info guides you know that you can use for for recovery sister city and corporate mo use you know just this whole list case management that exists already programs that exist all of these things can be sort of crafted towards a an economic resilience model and you can embed all of these assets into a plan and then finally just start small and workshop it you know I think a lot of times people think oh well we need to go out and get a hundred thousand dollar grants and like make this big you know system to do all this stuff I mean I I don't agree with that at all what we're doing is in the cd program now is working with communities just do small low cost planning exercises you know the one approach is to to actually do use a planning tool that we've made to sit down with local leaders and go through you know what are the the risks locally to the economy what can you do to mitigate it you know set the priorities and the cost and then you just sort it and you've got your list right there of things that you can work on over the year over two years ten years we're also doing planning exercises where you know we can sit down with the community and have them sort of go through what are scenarios locally what are assets and putting them together to create sort of a mitigation or recovery plan this stuff doesn't have to be expensive it doesn't have to be super time consuming but once you've gone through them then you have a roadmap of of where you want to go and if you want to dig deeper and spend a lot more money you can but if you don't you can work with that whole community to parcel out little pieces and have them take it forward so that's it for me thanks so much everyone for for paying attention and being involved and yeah that's it thanks so much Jeremy that was a really interesting and fun presentation if there are any questions please put them in the question box and i'll be happy to ask Jeremy them but i did have just one question from your presentation like it sounds like you've been working across multiple communities across the us and vc and have you found that there's some commonly overlooked aspects of community economic development and resiliency planning that you find again and again when you come into these communities that you could identify and maybe uh stop it happening in the future um here let me change my audio again um you know what i would say is that um there's generally there's generally two commonalities one is that um people are they have some trepidation around this you know it's like there's generally not enough um uh understanding or belief that this can happen there's a lot of fear and i think rightful fear that you know governments have and emergency managers have on taking on this kind of stuff and so um so you know there's you get into a community you're like hey here's all the things you can do and they're like ah i don't know like you know i don't think i can i can get to that right now and so you know partly it's trying to just sort of walk people through and give them the easy pieces to um to start building up and craft the narrative locally so that people think that it's possible um and then the other thing that i noticed is that people have a ton of assets that they're just not utilizing so much so you know they've got um you know great leaders locally who are embedded in the community they have lots of knowledge but it's just not all being organized down this track and so um you know i think that that's the useful part of the planning exercises is to just really be able to map your entire community and say hey we've already got a lot of infrastructure for resilience already we just need to to do it so um yeah those to me would be the two big commonalities yeah absolutely oh thanks for that um so i've got no more questions but uh before we go i just wanted to introduce my colleague alex to talk about the 2018 community uh local economic development survey so i'll pass it over to you alex this has been hiding over here in the corner yeah thanks ben uh good morning folks so yeah i just want to speak quickly to um a few results in the survey i did recently that i think can actually help put some of what Jeremy said in context in terms of what the next steps can be for us as communities in bc moving forward with the way the ecosystem kind of is now and hopefully that's helpful to you in your planning um so this survey was in the field from september to october of 2018 and it targeted people anyone working in economic development so whether that's through local governments or regional groups non-profits tourism organizations those kinds of people uh and just to get a sense of their priorities kind of what they want to do what they're struggling to do uh what they're working on now their goals and try to roll some that together and there's a few findings from that survey that i think can be useful here the full result was the full results aren't public yet so this is kind of a sneak peek of things that seem relevant to the topic at hand uh so to open it up i'm going to to Jeremy's point about you know this concept of community economic development is a more kind of holistic view in this sort of quadruple bottom line idea uh we had asked people what their main economic development priorities were in the long run and i think you see really good evidence here that a kind of broader more holistic perspective is developing so most popular now and you know forever and always is creating jobs kind of the bread and butter of traditional active but improving residents quality of life the sort of more holistic idea comes before even raising incomes so there is evidence that people starting to think about this in a more multimodal way growing population environmental sustainability both seen as kind of equally important through a pc so do as you're engaging in these conversations and reaching out to people about you know community active planning and resiliency is part of that bear in mind that views of active are expanding and these conversations are happening already you're not going to have to start that from scratch uh we didn't ask about resiliency in in the survey specifically unfortunately but we did ask about sustainability and what people were doing to ensure their active was sustainable uh and you'll see a good chunk of people but still less than half are using urban planning to prepare for natural disasters and floods and wildfires are some of the more common so that's starting to happen but it's still less than half of the communities and it's certainly fewer communities then are at risk of being affected by these things um and a tiny minority less than 10 percent we're using the technical options like we had here incorporating environmental risk management tools into active planning uh very few people are doing that might be capacity issue might be willingness for an awareness issue but regardless of take away from this is it right now resiliency planning strategies especially from an active perspective aren't happening very often so there is there's a lot of space to improve there as well and I want to close on a few points about partnerships and creating partnerships in BC Jeremy stressed a lot of the importance of kind of bringing the right people together and working together to get this done and even just among the priorities we asked about which again didn't include resiliency 36 percent of priorities in the province aren't being addressed through a partnership right now so there's a huge huge space to kind of start these conversations have to start these these partnerships to address these issues uh odds are you're not being left behind odds are these conversations aren't happening yet the other encouraging thing especially to the point about kind of starting small and keeping things simple in the early days people prefer less informal arrangements um collaborative projects and personal connections were the preferred forms of collaboration throughout BC so you know there's no need to kind of go into this like Jeremy said with a fully developed plan and everything ready to go firing on all cylinders have some conversations the opportunities there just reach out to folks that being said do bear in mind that um there's a pretty clear way in which people tend to prioritize the groups of people they work reach out to you know chambers of commerce other governments local businesses in general so just kind of doing a blanket survey those tend to come first some of the folks that Jeremy is mentioning is being very important so reaching out to residents especially seniors local businesses who serve a specific group or work in a particular sector so you know either those that will be most impacted by disaster or most necessary after disaster people almost never get around to talking to those kinds of groups you're doing that kind of targeted consultation so the opportunities are there for conversations you can start to have them but you're going to have to reach out a little bit beyond your usual network and and look beyond the usual suspects for those collaborations to happen so those are three takeaways that um yeah not not necessarily to expand on what Jeremy said but just to kind of put it in context of what we know about the way things look in BC right now views of active are expanding resiliency planning is still in common in the province and there are opportunities for conversations if you look a little bit beyond those usual networks so with that I'll pass it back to Ben there's any other questions I'm happy to field them or you can follow up with an email to economicdevelopment.gov.bc.ca we can chat a little bit more there and hopefully that helps you put some of this into action thanks a lot and a back thanks for that Alex um that survey is not available yet but um hopefully in the next couple of weeks looking to the middle of April that's going to be available so check out our website um to get all of the the results from that um there's also that'll be on our website as I said gov.bc.ca forward slash economic development but you'll also find a lot of other resources on that website um such as a business retention and expansion tool which is critical part of community economic development um so make sure to have a look on there um let's just finish up we're talking about some upcoming webinars so April 25th we've got our community gaming grants program webinar and June 6th what to say to foster visitation post wildfire marketing messages so that's all about uh you've had a wildfire obviously come through your community um how can you reattract tourism um if you want to sign up to our email list our webinar list that's the url um and if you hear about in our webinars through other sources you probably aren't on this list and we want you to be on there so make sure you head there and when you're signing up just note that the title is your job title and company name is your organization and we're pretty much done for the day but once you leave this webinar there will be a window that pops up asking you to take a brief feedback survey please take a few minutes to respond as your feedback helps us improve the series the recording of this webinar will go up on you youtube uh viewing and sharing the link will be sent out by email to everyone who's registered on today's webinar and will be added to the economic development website in the VCRDs exchange area thank you for joining us thank you Jeremy for your insightful presentation and uh we hope to see you all in the next couple of weeks bye