The Rural Voice, 1989-11, Page 30TAKING CHARGE
RURAL COMMUNITIES UNITE TO MAKE THEIR OWN DECISIONS
ABOUT THE FUTURE AND RURAL DEVELOPMENT
Too often, rural people feel overwhelmed by
urban -driven changes. Farming today supports only
a small percentage of the population, investment
pours into the cities and bypasses small towns, and
young people leave to seek jobs elsewhere. Comm-
unities seem vulnerable, and rural people wonder
how to gain control over their own future.
The answer to today's problems in rural commu-
nities, of course, is much the same as it has always
been: local co-operation. But barn -raisings and husk-
ing bees have given way to a different sort of com-
munity endeavour. Municipalities are banding to-
gether to gain local autonomy, young people are being
trained to deal with the realities of rural life today, and
change is being directed, not simply endured.
Paul Nichol lives on a farm in Huron County, and
is a graduate student in Guelph's University School of
Rural Planning and Development. Of late, he's been
employed as a Community Development Officer for
the "Saugeen Community," a group of 10 munici-
palities that have joined forces to ensure a productive
future for their region. Change is inevitable, it seems,
and has been particularly hard on farm families, but
communities can make the best of it. We asked Paul to
share his observations as a development officer and to
describe the work of the Saugeen Community.
Nothing is constant except
change. And change often creates
winners and losers, sometimes dis-
rupting traditional ways of life and
transfiguring communities.
In recent decades, change has not
always benefitted the small towns and
rural areas of Ontario. Rural parents
and grandparents can point out the
crossroads that used to support small
communities. And while not many
communities are threatened with
extinction these days, there is cause
for concern about the impacts of the
trends shaping our small towns and
rural areas.
As the rural economy has under-
gone transformations, the communi-
ties it supports have also been forced
to change. In the Huron County farm -
by Paul Nichol
ing community I grew up in, there are
fewer farms than there used to be. Oh,
the farm land is still there, but in many
cases the people aren't. Farms have
become larger through consolidations,
and were often purchased by non-
residents. Some of the homes of for-
mer neighbours now stand empty.
Others have long since been demol-
ished, eroding what used to be a close,
strongly knit neighbourhood.
And it wasn't long ago that my
father could drive down all the back
streets of the local village, past each
and every house, and tell me who
lived there. Nowadays, my father
would be hard-pressed to know three-
quarters of the community, myself
even less. The days of the stable,
predictable rural community appear
to be gone. This is but one side effect
of the changes shaping rural Ontario
today.
Rural communities in Ontario are
not dying, but they are facing pressure
from many sources. As farms and
farm populations have shrunk in num-
ber, communities reliant on agriculture
for support have faced decline as well.
For some farming communities, the
only way to survive has been by diver-
sifying the local economy to create
new jobs in areas like manufacturing,
services, or tourism.
And increasingly, this diversifica-
tion has been supported by the farm-
ing community because farmers and
their spouses need off -farm work to
keep their operations viable. Indeed,
more than a third of the farm operators
28 THE RURAL VOICE