Community Futures

Wednesday, 21 January 2009

By Garrett Simmons
Taber Times

Sitting around the same table last Thursday night, Community Futures Chinook and the Town of Taber walked away with some very similar awards.
At the second annual recognition awards dinner sponsored by SouthGrow Regional Alliance, Community Futures Chinook took home the honour for Excellence in Innovation for its Jack and Diane Go To Taber video. The town, in the same category, took second place in the category, a recognition honour for its Simple as Dirt project.
Jack and Diane Go To Taber was the culmination of two projects for Community Futures Chinook — the economic-development initiative Destination Taber, and getREAL, a youth-retention strategy. The result was a 15-minute video, which included a pair of Lethbridge actors, who posed as a couple from the big city looking to relocate to Taber. Along the way, they stop at a few Taber landmarks and get tours of five businesses — Lamb Weston, Frito-Lay, Lucerne, Lantic Inc. (Rogers Sugar) and Summit Motors, which presented a key component of the video, according to Pete Lovering of Community Futures Chinook, and allowed them to tackle a common problem all at once.
“I think it’s brought some people together,” he said. “It’s nice to see the different food processors sitting around the same table sharing ideas about hiring.”
Suzanne Koersen, also with Community Futures Chinook, added the companies were extremely helpful, and along with other contributors, helped make the video the success it has become.
“It came down to we have an amazing group of community builders and players.”
The award was the icing on the cake for a project that had been in the works since January 2007, when some initial funding was received. Then, from the time the story boards were being conceived, through to shooting the video and the editing process, another six months passed.
Dan Berdusco of Lethbridge Link did the shooting for the video, and played an instrumental role in the story-board process and with editing the final project to the specifications of the Community Futures Chinook team.
But while the award was for the video itself, it also highlighted the innovative nature with which it has been marketed. Once the video was completed, it was online, at www.destinationtaber.com and the Community Futures Chinook Web site, www.biz-help.ca. However, that was just the beginning. A marketing the distribution plan was developed through the use of the online social-networking Web site Facebook. According to Koersen, in the first seven weeks of the facebook campaign, more than 2.1 million impressions of the Jack and Diane ad appeared on the site. As such, the video has been viewed 900 times. She added the campaign targets those Facebook users under the age of 40, and can be tailored to run in any market.
The award, which now hangs in the Community Futures Chinook office, is something Lovering said is a nice feather in their collective hats.
“It’s nice to see there’s some recognition this way,” he said, and added it would have all not been possible without the backing of a very supportive board, and the co-operation of the Town of Taber, the M.D. of Taber and the Taber and District Chamber of Commerce.
Before the video came the Destination Taber Web site, a magazine on the Taber region, billboards in other regions of Canada and attendance at national job fairs. The video was funded through remaining funds from those projects and new funds from the getREAL project, financed by the provincial and federal governments, a project aimed to increase awareness of career opportunities in the local food-processing industry.
The town’s second-place recognition award was for Simple as Dirt, a new model for sustainability planning from a rural perspective. It addresses socio-economic and mutli-generational networks that exist and turns upside down the sustainability process, by demanding quality of life and wellness of residents should be considered first in any planning.