Shorenet Stories is a blog series from the Shorefast Institute for Place-Based Economies profiling the people and places of the Shorenet network. In this instalment, we speak with Dallas Gislason, Executive Director, Regional Economic Development at the South Island Prosperity Partnership (SIPP), and Carol Hall, Senior Director of Innovation & Impact at the Victoria Foundation, about Greater Victoria’s journey from the Community Economies Pilot to the inaugural Shorenet cohort and what comes next.
Shorefast Founder and CEO Zita Cobb often describes Canada as a collection of 5,000 distinct places. Greater Victoria sits in an interesting position within that picture. It is one of the country’s 30 or so larger metropolitan regions, home to 13 municipalities, nine First Nations communities, and many rural areas. It is a region of many scales at once.
This layered geography is precisely what makes Greater Victoria, South Vancouver Island a critical partner in the work of the Shorefast Institute. If place-based economic development can work across a region this varied, it can work anywhere. Geography is the starting point; collaboration is the piece that holds the work together.
Two organizations in the Greater Victoria region are leading the way to coordinate effectively across sectors, demonstrating what is possible when we work across all three pillars of society (markets, governments, and communities): South Island Prosperity Partnership (SIPP), a non-profit, public-private partnership of municipal governments, First Nations, post-secondaries, major employers, nonprofits and industry associations working as an economic alliance; and the Victoria Foundation, a charitable organization working in British Columbia and across Canada, bringing donors, charities, First Nations and other groups together to generate ideas and fund solutions to complex challenges.
From the pilot to the network
From the pilot came questions with staying power. “We came out of the pilot with new ways of thinking about economic stewardship, asking questions like: What happens if we bring together communities of different sizes, different histories?” Carol Hall recalls of their participation.
“Based on the experiences of Fogo Island and the Pilot, there are a lot of rich learnings [for how] Shorenet can move this work forward. It is keeping in mind very different contexts and scales, but all places, including Greater Victoria, have to look at how money flows in and stays circulating to ensure that we are able to get capital into our community where decisions are made locally.”
The pilot left a lasting mark on SIPP’s strategy, too. “The biggest thing that changed for us going through the pilot is how much emphasis we have in our conversations and in our strategy on community wealth building,” Dallas Gislason says. Rather than focusing narrowly on business growth and private sector jobs, community wealth building — ownership models, reinvestment, keeping value circulating where it is made — is now set to become a core pillar of SIPP’s next five-year strategy. “The use of the words community economy and place-based economy…that language wasn’t really at the top of our lexicon before, and now it is a huge part of our thinking and our approach.”
Shorenet emerged as a continuation of that work, bridging gaps between communities across the country facing challenges of all scales.
A methodology that travels
The design challenge was making sure the methodology holds at every scale. “If you're a really small community, your contributors might all be people that you know personally, like your neighbours, business owners, elected officials,” Dallas explains. “That concept scales to a city like Toronto. Who are the contributors? You have your large corporations, your capital people, your elected officials, your non-profits. You're assembling that same group of people.” Bringing together that group of people is what the Shorefast Institute for Place-Based Economies refers to as an Economic Stewardship Table – An assemblage of economic actors in a community, in a place, to work together to steward their local economy.
At any scale, the questions are the same: where does wealth enter a community? What happens once it arrives? How much of it stays? “How do we keep more of it locally through things like ownership models, through reinvestment? How do we prevent that wealth, once it's here, from leaking out?”
For Carol, watching SIPP translate its practice into a national curriculum on Shorenet’s learning platform reflects something reciprocal about the network. “To be able to elevate and recognize that they're leading the way, and a building model nationally, is significant to our region,” she says. “That national level partnership and learning from other peers — but also the amount we contribute into that from our local experiences as well – is reflective of the reciprocity of learning that's been really valuable.”
She credits the partnership with something subtler, too: language. “Being part of this national partnership has allowed us to bring in language and think about this work in a different way,” she says. “It captures the imagination of what's possible around place-based economies.”
Agency as a form of hope
“If we want to talk about Canadian sovereignty, we need to talk about place sovereignty,” he says. “Let's get organized at the local level. What is the economy? It’s human behaviour. Where is that human behaviour located? It's located in places.”
For him, the promise of Shorenet is turning collaboration from an abstraction into a discipline. “Give people the tools, the language, the governance models, knowledge of which financial and investment options to use,” he says. “Collaboration is not this loose thing. It’s a real process that leads to outcomes, and it’s applicable everywhere in Canada.”
Carol hears that in a word the Shorefast Institute returns to often. “What you’re really talking about is agency,” she says. “Through place-based strategies and tools, there’s that sense of agency — of what we can control. And for me, that’s hope.”
Dallas agrees, pointing to the alternative. “Think about the opposite of agency. It’s apathy, disinterest… it’s cynicism. Taking action and doing things is the antithesis to all of that.”
Both see economic literacy as part of the work ahead. Not everyone needs a technical grasp of regional economics, but every place needs a core group who understand their economy well enough to act on it, and stories that invite everyone else in. “It’s the storytelling and the modelling of an alternative way of being and doing that allows more of a movement of people to understand and join in,” Carol says. “This new way, which is an old way.”
That, in the end, is what Shorenet exists to do: connect the people doing this work in real places, so that the lessons of one shore can travel to another. The realities of Greater Victoria are not the realities of Fogo Island, but they both tell similar stories.
Shorenet connects people and places across Canada committed to stewarding the local economies that serve their communities.
Dive Deeper
into Shorenet
Shorenet Stories: Greater Victoria and the Practice of Place at Every Scale
Money in Place: Newmarket’s Journey with The Shorefast Institute
Shorenet Stories: Prince Edward County
Community Reinvestment: The Golden Mile Finds Inspiration on Fogo Island
Alaina Lockhart’s journey with Shorefast
