The wooden giant towering over the town of Westlock was about to disappear like so many other grain elevators on the Prairies.
Recognizing its importance to the Alberta farm country north of Edmonton, the local community rallied to save it.
Norm Bates, general manager of Tawatinaw Community Futures Development Corp., said Westlock gathered together motivated people, armed itself with information on independent elevator operations and began raising more than $1 million to launch a new generation co-op in 2002.
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The result was Westlock Terminals NGC Ltd., which has since been upgraded in 2004 and 2005. It set a record this past year, handling more than 125,000 tonnes.
Bates presented this success story, one of numerous award-winning community initiatives, at the Pan Canadian Community Futures conference in Whistler, B.C., this summer.
“It’s a success story with a significant impact on our community,” he said. “It has become one of the grain elevators of choice for area farmers.”
Bates said it is an example of a community not giving up, taking charge and shaping its own future.
The conference was a manifestation of a growing movement of rural and small communities generating increasingly sophisticated templates to revive local economies.
The success in Westlock followed a path similar to that taken by other small communities as they struggle to find prosperity.
Westlock’s path to success included working with a core group of credible, passionate, motivated individuals, liaising regularly with the media and public throughout the process and soliciting financial support from the community.
Bates stressed the importance of researching the topic well, noting Westlock hired experts to draft its business plan. It also acquired funding to launch the enterprise, citing the town’s initial $10,000 contribution to help with legal and meeting costs.
Through the community’s efforts, six full-time and two part-time jobs were maintained. Equally important, services were retained in the community that might otherwise have left.
“We kept the shopping patterns the same,” Bates said.
Farmers come to town to unload grain, but also shop with their families at the grocery store, eat a meal at the café and fuel their vehicle.
“These are businesses that might have been lost,” he said.
Dave Felstad, Westlock Terminals’ founding chair, said some in the community felt it would never happen, but the majority supported the elevator initiative.
“The community had the foresight to see that losing it would impact us negatively,” said Felstad, who farms at Dapp.
Without the elevator, farmers would have to truck their grain 100 kilometres farther.
Felstad said main street businesses eagerly invested, knowing their future depended on it.
“It’s an excellent example of farm people and businesspeople working together to achieve something,” he said. “The town is prospering and growing and we’re just a part of that.”
