Five Year Plan & Sustainability Vision

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CBCEDA: “How can Cape Breton County position itself in terms of its challenges and opportunities to best utilize and provide for its greatest asset – the people of Cape Breton County?” Here is our answer, a 5-year plan & sustainability vision entitled ‘Green Beacon, Bright Future: An experimental development model for the Coastal Discovery Centre’. 

Click here to download the PDF.

Since the conversion of our former elementary school into a community social and enterprise centre, the Main-à-Dieu Community Development Association (MCDA) has been working diligently to ensure that the faith placed in us by all our funding partners (ECBC, CBRM, HRDC, CBCEDA) has been deserved.

Cape Breton Rural Community Economic Development

In its first five years of operation, The Coastal Discovery Centre (CDC) has been called home by the Fishermen’s Museum, Big Wave Café, Lobster Hut, Library, Credit Union, and C@P site; has provided a meeting space for seniors’ bingo & cards, the Crafters Club, and Tai Chi classes; and has served as event headquarters for the annual Lobster Fest, John Hall Memorial Boat Festival, Bertha Wadden Memorial Lob-ball Tournament, and ‘Poetry With A View’ reading.

The Crisis: the Failed Model

And yet, at the very moment when the Centre has demonstrated not only its centrality but its indispensability to the economic and social life of the area, it risks closure, mainly due to rising energy costs and the departure of its core tenant (the Credit Union).

Despite our best efforts, the project has proven unable to generate sufficient commercial and rental income to cover its costs (principally, overhead and staffing).

Additional sources of revenue – from grants and fund raising – have provided no better guarantee for the long-term sustainability of the enterprise. Endless fundraising, while always exceeding expectations, is contributing to burn-out in volunteers and contributors alike; and outside funding, while providing invaluable skills training and employment opportunities, comes tied to short-term projects with the unrealistic expectation of near-spontaneous fiscal self-sufficiency.

While this is an appropriate criterion of success to apply to a corporation, looking at a not-for-profit volunteer association through the same lens – that is, seeing the Centre as primarily, even solely, an economic venture – is to skew one’s view of, if not to become blinded to, its purpose: namely the provision of a unique and irreplaceable focus of socio-economic activity for the communities of Main-à-Dieu, Bateston, Little Lorraine, Baleine and Catalone.

The Crossroads: an Alternative Model

Nova Scotia’s newly named Department of Economic and Rural Development has identified the “very critical impact that the social environment has on” the ability of a province’s government and economy to “perform.” (Quoted in The Nova Scotia Policy Review, March 2009.)

But a government, no less an economy, doesn’t simply perform; it provides, as CBCEDA notes in its own 5-year strategic plan for Cape Breton County, when it asks:

“How can Cape Breton County position itself in terms of its challenges and opportunities to best utilize and provide for its greatest asset, the people of Cape Breton County?”

This is not to absolve rural communities of the responsibility – one which every member of society shares – to do their part to provide for themselves as well as others. This is the very mandate of the MCDA.

But it does recognize limitations – both necessary and contingent – and asks that community organizations like ours be treated as we actually and inevitably exist and function: a community, not a corporation; a volunteer executive, not professional executives; a businesslike not-for-profit organization, not a profitable business.

Forcing community organizations to pretend to be something they’re not sets the stage for failure when the venture doesn’t adequately ‘perform’ – a scenario not only irrational but, given our social basis and mandate, even immoral.

An alternative, and far more accurate, appraisal of our worth should start by asking what demonstrable daily difference we are making to the life of our communities. And by assuming that the provision of certain indispensable services and opportunities, while ‘unprofitable’ in strict fiscal terms, is socially invaluable. (Though we will soon see how only the most short-sighted accounting can render this worth unprofitable even in conventional economic terms.)

In short, it means treating the social viability of the community as itself worthy of funding.

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Posted by Mike Targett | Email a comment