An Alberta leadership initiative program hopes to tap into rural churches to train community leaders.
The Rural Community Leadership Initiative received $313,313 from the Rural Alberta Development Fund to develop community leaders in Camrose, Millet, New Brigden, Oyen and Wainwright.
Wayne Hove, a board member with the Centre for Community Leadership and Ministry, said it’s a chance for churches to regain their natural facilitation role.
“Historically the faith-based network, the churches, used to be where church and non-church people gathered to make decisions on where a school or road should go,” he said.
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“There is a plethora of churches in the West.”
By training leaders in the community, the non-denominational program will use online tools and the underused infrastructure of churches to train local citizens in peer mentorship, crisis intervention and economic development.
Hove said a lot of the program material has already been developed and is in use by a similar Saskatchewan group, the Centre for Rural Community Leadership and Ministry.
“The real issue is not that we don’t have a lot of bright people in rural areas, it’s just most of the people don’t have the time and energy to move the community forward,” he said.
“To have someone residing in your community that is trained, that’s just one more resource that can come to the table. What everyone is really trying to do is make the community a nicer place to live.”
Nettie Wiebe, chair of the Saskatchewan sister organization, said rural communities have lost a lot of people in recent decades – especially young people – leaving few people willing or able to take on leadership roles.
With rural communities growing once again, Wiebe said it’s important to rejuvenate the leadership abilities within the community and not just “follow directions” from urban areas.
“We have our directions to set, our own needs and our own strengths.”
Leadership is more than just training. It is about awakening a passion to change things and to set a new direction, she said.
“Part of good leadership is not charging in and setting a new course, but evoking passion and awakening possibilities and using those possibilities,” she said. “It’s not just in economic opportunities, but awakening people’s sense of their own strengths and pride of place and their own values in their own place.”
Hove said rural communities can parachute in programs and people, but they never last as long as locally conceived ideas.
“I think this is a better way to get at that.”
