Over 100 people gathered in the Boyle Community Centre April 24 to hear presenter and consultant Doug Griffiths speak about building stronger communities.
Griffiths, a former MLA and author of the book 13 Ways to Kill Your Community, spoke to residents and leaders from the Village of Boyle and surrounding areas about the things that help a community to grow, and perhaps more critically, the things that can harm its growth.
“I think it was wonderful,” said chair of the Greater Athabasca Community Foundation Lindsey Stanton. “Everything is so important to making a community, and there are a few things that we need to work on.”
Griffiths spoke about his time serving as an MLA and working as Minister of Municipal Affairs and Minister of Service Alberta, and his subsequent transition to starting his community consulting firm.
“Part of the reason I left politics was so that I could get back to doing this,” he said. “Because I would go to communities, but afterwards people would say ‘now what?’ and I wanted to be able to do that ‘now what.’”
Griffiths then transitioned to speaking about the 13 ways communities can sabotage themselves as they try to develop and grow. This included not providing quality water, not encouraging competition between local businesses, not engaging a community’s youth, not understanding and marketing what makes their community unique, not supporting local businesses, inadequate marketing, poor co-operation, ignoring the community’s seniors, being unwilling to change, not listening to outsiders, assuming the status quo is OK, being shortsighted and not taking responsibility for enacting the change.
Griffiths highlighted each of these points with real world examples he had experienced during his time in government. For example, he spoke about a town whose single gas station suffered because it was it had no competitors, and thus provided lower quality of service.
“Competition forces businesses to step their game up and find ways to better serve their customers,” he said.
After his presentation, Griffiths took questions and comments from the crowd, who expressed their belief in the potential of Boyle as a place that can grow in the future. Athabasca-Sturgeon-Redwater MLA Colin Piquette said the fact that several organizations partnered together to bring Griffiths to Boyle was a sign that the community had the right attitude.
“It’s great to have Doug,” he said. “But the fact that community got together to bring Doug in is a real positive step.”
