Course:IGS585/OK2020WT2/GuestMargCoulson

Marg Coulson - Village of Keremeos

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	Reflection Authors and Commenters
Author	Ian Chambers	Ayla de Grandpre	Adam Kunis	Joshua Ayer	Janna Wale
Commenter	Janna Wale	Adam Kunis	Joshua Ayer	Ayla de Grandpre	Ian Chambers

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Janna Wale Something that really impressed me about Marg Coulson’s presentation was the amount of general knowledge she has about Keremeos, and how she was able to transition effectively between the topics in her presentation. She was able to give us a broad overview of the community while being able to completely answer our more specific questions about the region. Having worked in government before (which interacts with smaller communities and capacities), this is a skill that I am always impressed by. Furthering this, I recognize the importance of having people with a skillset like Marg’s when working for small communities where the capacity is oftentimes very limited. I think this also speaks to the worker shortage she brought up during her presentation. Having a very tiny tax base no doubt influences the capacity that Marg and her team have to work with. I am grateful that she took time out of her busy schedule to come and speak with us in light of this. During her presentation, Marg made a comment about how Keremeos is struggling with seasonality. In essence, how Keremeos sees large fluctuations across a year. The context of the comment was talking about seasonal workers, as well as the seasonal nature of tourism. However, her comment made me reflect on some of the work I have been doing in my own thesis around seasonality in Indigenous communities. My research is focused on creating resilience in Indigneous communities specifically using their traditional seasonal rounds. Later in her presentation, she spoke about climate change, and the fire and flood events that Keremeos is now dealing with. While these events have always been present as a part of the disturbance regime in the area (from my understanding), they are now being felt with more intensity, more unpredictability, and more frequency. While not directly related to the seasonality she spoke of earlier, I believe there is a connection to overall community resilience that shifts seasonally, similar to the shifting of a seasonal round.  Furthering this idea, the Syilx nation traditionally lived according to the seasons using a unique seasonal round, similar to what is found in many Indigneous communities. By planning for and living in time with the seasons, the Syilx people were able to thrive in their territory for centuries. By having an overall seasonal way of life, the Syilx were quite resilient to the many disturbances of the area. Reflecting on this, I wonder if there is potential for working collaboratively with Syilx governance to establish some kind of seasonally rooted plan in order to not only overcome but thrive in the change of seasons that are being felt in Keremeos. Ian Chambers This is a reflection on the reflection of the author above. Marg’s breadth of knowledge was definitely impressive and seeing the many faucets of her job really impressed me in terms of how much Keremeos is trying to do with such few resources. Having somebody of Marg’s calibre that is able to seamlessly transition between many different topics and issues is undoubtedly a huge benefit for the town. I was also really struck by the seasonality of the issues Keremeos faces that Marg brought up. I had never really considered that different challenges arise at different times. I more just focused on the issues that need to be addressed and not when they needed to be addressed. With different challenges arising at different times of the year and limited resources, it must be very challenging to deal with. From your reflection, I’m curious to learn more about the Syilx seasonal way of life and how that helped them thrive in the face of seasonal challenges. Trying to adapt some of these ideas to apply to Keremeos I think would be a very beneficial exercise.

Ayla De Grandpre

I think that Marg’s presentation provided an excellent example of how we might proceed with creating a town profile for our term project. I thought it was interesting that she connected the key characteristics of the town, such as the demographics and the climate, to the key resilience and sustainability challenges that they are facing (e.g. population aging and fire and flood). Linking the characteristics of place to the challenges faced by the community is an interesting, and I think as very effective, way of framing sustainability and resilience issues. It reminds me of the way that harmful impacts are identified and characterized in the field of Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA).

I took a class last semester in EIA, and learned that practitioners will commonly identify the valued components (VCs) of the system (community), and then consider how a proposed project might affect these key characteristics. So in essence, they are highlighting the link between the characteristics of the community that people value, and the negative impacts of the project. While this is not explicitly what Marg did, I think that there is potential to consider Keremeos’ challenges through a similar process. What I am taking out of this presentation is that we might want to consider linking the characteristics of Keremeos that we identified in the “profile”, to identify and prioritize which issues might be most salient.

Another aspect of Marg’s presentation that I found valuable, and frankly kind of surprising, were the large number of programs and services being offered and implemented already to deal with a lot of the emergent issues. Particularly in the area of the aging population and healthy aging, I thought there were some interesting strategies already being implemented that I was not aware of. Desite this, I think there is still considerable work to be done in attracting young people and having appropriate programing and infrastructure for youth and young families. Understanding what is being done already in Keremeos will certainly help streamline the process of identifying additional strategies that Keremeos might employ to deal with the key challenges. I feel as though Marg's presentation really opened my eyes to the wide array of sustianbility and resilience-focused strategies already being employed in Keremeos, as well as the barriers to larger, perhaps more capital, time or expertise-intensive programs that may exceed the current capacities of the village and its resources. I think that going forward in our term project, we are going to havr to be cognoscent of the potential limitations imposed by available resources (particularly time and money).

Adam Kunis

Hi Ayla, I think borrowing from Marg's presentation strategy would be very beneficial to our term project. Not only was it extremely effective in delivering the topic content, but if Keremeos would like to see our final reports, it would be in a familiar format. I did not pick up on the similarities to EIA VC, but reflecting on the presentation it is a great comparison. It may be very beneficial to provide a preliminary EIA or identify the VCs if our term project concludes with a suggestion.

For all the programs, I too was surprised about the breadth and depth of the programs. However, she did not describe their participation rates. When we probed with further questions about getting the community involved, it seemed liked she pivoted and wanted to paint the situation in a positive, optimistic outlook. She described great success to programs that provided personal benefit (outdoor gyms, presentation/drinking nights, etc.), but did not describe the success of projects for the younger population. I fear that there may be a greater divide over support for programs that aid youth populations i.e. what the youth of the town want to see as this would require giving up control/power.

Joshua Ayer Having Marg Coulson present to our class was truly a gift given her experience in public administration and direct access to Keremeos.  Her presentation shed light on and clarified issues and challenges our class was curious about.  What I found particularly valuable was her insight regarding the thoughts and opinions of Keremeos regarding sustainable initiatives, town regulations, and local values. She also identified elements of problems that I hadn’t considered such as the arid climate contributing to the severity of flooding because the ground doesn’t absorb water the way it would in a less arid climate. There was a lot that she said that I hope to incorporate into the final report. In reflecting, I really enjoyed the format of Coulson’s presentation when it came to the sustainability initiatives in Keremeos: identifying a vulnerability and then the actions that are already underway to address that vulnerability.  I appreciated this because in addition to distinguishing the challenges that the town faces, Coulson also brought our attention to the work that is being done already.  Given that part of the expectation of our final report is to acknowledge ways that Keremeos has already had success in overcoming its sustainability and resiliency challenges, this started the momentum for me of thinking in this general direction.  For instance, the installation of outdoor exercise equipment, rolling groups with health talks, support for rural care facilities are all actions that they town has taken to address their aging population. As well, in addressing their economic vulnerabilities, the town supports local events like rodeos and car shows.  Similarly, the town is exploring alternate forms of energy to use in powering their infrastructure and residences in addressing the damage wrought on the environment.  Presenting the actions being undertaken by the town to date provided an opportunity to recognize Keremeos as active in finding solutions to its sustainability problems. In this respect, they have already begun taken important steps in addressing their vulnerabilities as a town. There were several initiatives that Coulson mentioned that, combing through the OCP’s, I hadn’t seen.  Another part of the presentation that stood out to me was when Coulson spoke about the local elementary school as being imperative to the town’s ability to attract new families. This struck me as highlighting a unique tension between using public funds and resources to provide infrastructure for the existing population but with an eye towards maintaining and developing infrastructure for the population they need as well to be sustainable. This is a balance that we will have to bear in mind in addressing sustainability and resiliency in Keremeos, making what presently exists more sustainable and resilient, while also identifying ways for it to grow and change in sustainable ways. Ayla De Grandpre Joshua, Thanks for your reflection. I was also struck by the number of initiatives underway and thought it was a really helpful reminder to consider what is already being done. I think that we can use this information as a "spring board" to go off of when looking at potential areas of focus and strategies to address resilience and sustainability challenges in the community. I also really appreciated your comment regarding Keremeos' strategies for attracting new families (e.g. schools). I think that this demonstrates proactive, rather than reactive adaptation and planning, which to me signifies a strong planning regime and self-organizational capacity. From what I have learned in my course work and personally, proactive and multi-generational thinking is key to establishing resilience and sustainability. I would really like to explore the idea of proactive planning and the different initiatives that Keremeos is employing to attract young families and new businesses for my contribution in the next challenge seminar. I look forward to reporting back what I find!

Adam Kunis Marg gave a phenomenal presentation that presented key details about Keremeos’ demographic and geographic challenges and communal assumptions. I appreciated how she quickly level set the village’s economic capacity by providing two key details. The small tax base and the low population. By diving deeper into the reasons behind these two key factors, she painted a clear picture of Keremeos’ current situation. Following these details with the village’s primary goal, to keep the local public school operational, she highlighted one of Keremeos’ highest priorities, youth education. I found Marg’s presentation style and sequencing of information to be very informative, while also being very easy to understand. For future presentations, I will be borrowing from presentation structure and using a telescoping approach to vividly present complex scenarios. I also found her position on highways running through downtown centers very interesting. In many of the places I have lived, highways have always run through the outskirts of the towns. However, here in British Columbia, it seems that the highway runs directly through most rural communities. Even in Kelowna, the highway runs straight through the middle of town. While I could see the short-run benefit of this for a small community such as Keremeos, it does not seem to outweigh the cons. A highway that runs through downtown can potentially attract more tourists. This was addressed by Marg’s description of coffee shops and restaurants that attract short-term, “passing through” tourists. However, a highway through downtown poses risks to the community. The area surrounding the highway may become less safe and make non-vehicular transportation riskier. It also has limited expansion opportunities. Due to the scarcity of land in a valley, this may be a particular challenge to Keremeos. That means if the highway grows (including its dependent sectors e.g., gas stations), it will be taking land away from the village, and if the village grows, it will have to accommodate a through highway which may increase air, sound, and light pollution. Further, highways that run through downtowns are less effective and less sustainable due to idling traffic, fuel efficiencies, stop signs, and rush-hour slowdowns. As a community with a predominant aging population who have concerns about air pollution becoming trapped in the valley, highway adaptation seems like an area of improvement with great potential. Marg closed her session by addressing other challenges that Keremeos currently faces with transportation. I can only imagine that the vulnerabilities for this sector would be compounded by multiple exposures such as climate change. Extreme flooding (with the water waste example), landslides, forest fires, and polar snaps associated with climate change will exasperate any transportation issue. This has the potential to turn deadly should an evacuation be necessary. Joshua Ayer I also really appreciated the clarity of Marg's presentation on Friday, and I think your goal to incorporate her telescopic method of presentation is a great idea that I hope I get to see in class sometime on Keremeos. As you said, Marg emphasized the two impediments facing Keremeos are a small tax base and correspondingly low population, one of the things she said in reference to this was that Keremeos has, a solution, secured an abundance of government grants (and I think she even mentioned some more, as did Nahid, that they were hoping to apply for). Now that you've provoked the thought to me, I would wonder if there is anyway to see what policies and programs have been most successful in attracting new residents, especially new families, if at all. Your thoughts on the highway are really interesting, I hadn't even thought much of that reality before reading your reflection. I noticed that the town's primary evacuation route is along the highway, but it is also within the zone identified as potentially at risk of flooding (they have a second evacuation route of course). You have a pretty good list of cons for the centrality of the highway, I wonder what is required to ameliorate that situation, as well what the towns people think about it.

Ian Chambers I’m really grateful for Marg joining our class and sharing a wealth of information and experience in Keremeos with us. She has so much knowledge on such a diverse range of projects in Keremeos that is invaluable for our term project. One thing I took away from her discussion was a theme of seasonality in the sustainability issues that Keremeos faces. Natural events like flooding, fire and drought are seasonal as are economic challenges such as the tourism and agriculture industries operating mainly in the summer and leaving a void the rest of the year. Marg even stated that local businesses struggle with the seasonality of tourism, and with a good portion of the local population spending winter in warmer climates. I had never really considered how sustainability challenges persist throughout the entire year, but that the specific challenge changes with the season. This must make it difficult to deal with the diverse range of challenges considering the small budget that Keremeos has to work with to implement initiatives to address the challenges. Marg also talked about Keremeos’ approach to sustainability challenges, where they identify the vulnerability then apply a sustainable plan or practice to build resiliency. I thought this was a simple and concise way of approaching sustainability issues and admired that Keremeos has already incorporated this into their policy and decision-making process. I think that keeping this in mind will help us in our term project as well. One of the examples Marg gave in applying this process was identifying the vulnerability of energy consumption and how it is costly and leaves a large footprint. She stated that Keremeos was examining alternate forms of energy such as wind and solar. I don’t think this has come up in any of our other presentations or discussions, I’m interested in learning more about the feasibility of these other energy sources. Another thing that Marg brought up was the push back they receive from locals on sustainable initiatives. I wonder if there is a process that could address this and get residents on board. It seems like there is limited community engagement, for example in town halls and other interfaces between the community and policy makers. I wonder how this engagement could be improved and if that is a good place to start fostering a community that appreciates the sustainability initiatives that Marg made it clear Keremeos cares about. Janna Wale Ian, Like you, I was very interested in the seasonal nature of Marg's discussion. My thesis is about seasonal resilience in Indigenous communities, so I found her presentation very relevant. I found it interesting that even the residents of Keremeos leave during winter months - this is not something I had considered before either. I appreciate that you brought up alternative energies; I agree that this would be a good avenue to explore for our group work. I wonder about the pushback to sustainability initiatives as well - do we think this is age related? Given that Keremeos has an aging population, I wonder what the best method of communication would be to reach that demographic when starting to consider consultation for implementation of the ideas we will have in our project. I agree that this is an area that could be improved, and is definitely worth further exploration in our group project.