The Community Wellbeing Leadership Program (CWLP) is about building the capacity of communities to develop high-quality leadership solutions that support enhancing community wellbeing in all its various dimensions. The program does this by helping communities to train new leaders with the skills and viewpoints that will help them to better understand their community's needs, to develop solutions with long-term sustainable impacts, and to be able to monitor these impacts as a series of discrete performance measures over time.

 

PROJECT ORIGINS AND CONTEXT

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How do communities make informed and effective decisions about the future well-being of their communities and provide the required level of leadership when faced with the complexities of long-term economic development opportunities?

This question serves as the context for the Foundation’s research into the approaches, tools, and best practices that can support and guide community leaders when confronting the opportunity for economic growth, recognizing that the long-term impacts of such growth can have profound effects on the community’s current and future well-being if not considered carefully and led effectively.

 

The project scope includes questions focusing on factors such as:

• provincial- and municipal-level land use policy;
• individual landowner and community rights;
• commercial exploitation of sub-surface minerals, oil and gas;
• public land user groups; and
• broader conversation efforts by a range of local, provincial and other actors.

As the stakeholder and decision-making groups in such issues are geographically dispersed and not generally captured in any one physical community, the program has taken a broad approach to defining and working with the relevant target communities in such projects.

The Community Wellbeing Leadership Program works with the leadership group (council, key staff, committees, etc.) inside target communities to provide them with an enhanced awareness of the inter-dependencies involved in long-term economic development and other decisions that impact a community’s relative measure of “well-being”. The project also seeks to equip these leadership groups to better lead such initiatives in an informed and sustainable manner. The leadership group in such cases is not restricted solely to those in positions of formal leadership (either elected officials or paid staff). Instead, it includes volunteers and other individuals or groups that exert significant influence on the direction of decisions that impact broad community wellness.

 

RESEARCH AND PROJECT APPROACHES

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Integrated assessment and planning of longer-term economic development and community sustainability projects has been the subject of considerable research in the past decade. Fully integrated planning is particularly problematic for small and rural communities that lack the internal expertise, staff capabilities, and more sophisticated information-gathering and decision systems of larger urban communities. Further, these same limitations act to hinder the development of long-term institutional memory within the community, leading to problems with maintaining necessary levels of performance monitoring and oversight for larger-scale development initiatives over time (often measured in terms of multi-generational impacts).

Within the Community Wellbeing Leadership Program, the Foundation draws upon several international research projects focusing on the role of local decision systems and their impact on the evaluation of comparative community “wellbeing” in connection with large-scale development projects.

In defining the concept of well-being, we draw first and foremost on the domains and tools developed by the Canadian Index of Wellbeing (CIW) initiative. This is one of the most comprehensive efforts in the world to develop usable community-level wellbeing measures to guide discussions, community decisions, and long-term tracking of sustainable outcomes.

 

 

OTHER INTERNATIONAL APPROACHES

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DISTILLATE Project

The first of these is the UK-based Design and Implementation Support Tools for Integrated Local land Use, Transport and the Environment (DISTILLATE) project. 

Funded as part of the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council’s research programme on Sustainable Urban Environment (SUE), the DISTILLATE initiative provides considerable insights on the complexity of coordinating sophisticated policy deliberations in a multi-stakeholder, sustainability-focused context (at right).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

MATISSE Project

Similarly, the Methods and Tools for Integrated Sustainability Assessment (MATISSE) project is a partnership of 21 organizations across the European Union that has focused on building teachable methodologies for creating a common vision of sustainability and tools for action within multi-stakeholder environments. 

The MATISSE approach also formally incorporates a learning stage into the process, and divides the subsequent application of these integrated sustainability assessment (ISA) stages across issues such as agriculture, forestry and land-use; resource use, waste and dematerialization; water; and, sustainable environmental technology development (see figure, left).