Sustaining & Leveraging a Community Team for CED

First, do you create a Community Team or create the mechanism to support one?

That is the chicken & egg scenario that Golden & Area A faces in Spring 2015.

While there has been interest in developing, aligning and strengthening, the non profit sector in Golden & Area A since 2010, formalizing that sustainable structure has been challenging. To further challenge the sector, there has been minimal political interest in supporting a Community Team. After a presentation by Jill Zacharias, City of Revelstoke's Social Development Coordinator, there was a proposal to allocate some funding from the cancelled Grant in Aid program ($22,500) from the Town of Golden for a similar position. However, this concept was not moved forward during the last Council's term and the current Council has in fact re-allocated $20,000 back to a Grant In Aid program.

By way of a Simon Fraser University (SFU) Community Economic Development (CED) course hosted in Golden in December 2014, there has been considerable interest in the "Constellation Model" concept and applying that to local community groups and projects. There is already an Early Childhood Development Coalition (ECDC), an Age Friendly Community Plan and Committee, and ongoing discussions among Trails, Faith-Based, Education and Sports & Recreation organizations. There is also plans underway for bringing local youth-focused groups together to discuss opportunities, overlap, sharing, results and alignment. All of these activities are leading the community's organizations towards formalized constellations and, ultimately, a Community Team.

However, at the end of the day, and for many reasons outlined in this project, a Community Team needs to be supported - to some extent both financially and politically.

For More Info:
Visit a discussion on alternative models of CED and Community Teams on this site. To participate in a future Community Team Prototyping event, contact Ryan at [email protected].