Griffiths pushes a collaborative approach at mayor’s dinner

BY JOHN MATHER Former Progressive Conservative MLA and Municipal Affairs Minister

together then they all will experience benefits.

Doug Griffiths wowed the large crowd at Bruderheim’s Mayor Karl Hauch’s annual dinner April 28.

Griffiths is author of 13 Ways to Kill Your Community and also now runs a consulting business 13 Ways Inc.

Griffiths spoke with great enthusiasm on his topic of ways communities and the management of them have evolved over the years.

“I love what I do because I think building communities is the single most important job on earth,” he said. “I have been working on community building for 25 years and I love this stuff.”

His topic was “Collaboration, Coopera tion and the Future of Communities.”

He said the topic was important and the lack of the cooperation and collaboration between communities is “the plague of the 21st century.”

“It will destroy them if they don’t work together.”

Using examples of municipalities he had worked with, he showed how communities not working together on economic development will hurt one or two of them while benefitting the third, but if they all work

Using humour as he spoke, he outlined how societies have changed since man first started walking the earth and how we’ve evolved from hunters and gatherers, to agrarian societies, to the industrial revolution, to now, the technology age.

“We don’t change to our own detriment,” said Griffiths. “We’re going to look like idiots if we don’t adapt to the changes that are coming in society.”

He used the speed of computer and technological change as an example of how quickly we must adapt to change.

“Technology is changing everything about our communities,” he told the audience. In healthcare, education and right to general meetings using zoom he pointed out how things were changing quickly.

He pointed out how housing was changing from larger homes to much smaller living spaces.

Online technology could be used to bring further investments to communities quickly,” he pointed out.

He said the new generation of workers worked well in a collaborative setting rather than in the past where full competitiveness was the norm.

“That was an old mind set where I win by mak- ing you lose,” he said. “It’s a completely different set of values now.”

He said this wasn’t new that each generation had all changed their values over the years.

Griffiths talked about regional cooperation between communities and used the example of regional fire departments as an example.

“Firefighters used to be able to put out a fire,” he said. “But now the firefighters have to be properly licensed to drive the truck, qualified to use the equipment and they need special instruction in techniques from fighting different types of fires to search and rescue.”

He added that most community buildings must also force some collaboration between communities so the region can have a strong community centre.

Griffiths advocated eliminating borders as communities begin to work together more.

He said as societies move forward they have to stop thinking “it’s about us” and more on how working collaboratively can help the vast majority of the population.

Communities have to work to discover what makes them unique and then use that uniqueness as a marketing tool.

He finished his presentation by stating there were five rules for positive development of communities.

Lowest taxes, infra- structure, housing and workforce, services and finally collaboration and co-operation were the building blocks of making a community successful, he concluded.

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