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Putting Whistler’s social capital to work

Whistler has been likened to a Petri dish, a bowl in the mountains where innovative planning experiments have poked and prodded into shape a world class resort town.

Whistler has been likened to a Petri dish, a bowl in the mountains where innovative planning experiments have poked and prodded into shape a world class resort town.

And true to this analogy, yet another project is percolating in the lab – Whistler as a demonstration Learning Community.

On Tuesday, May 1 a group of Whistler representatives from the civic, educational, health, economic, public and community sectors gathered at municipal hall with one of the few experts in this country on the subject of Learning Communities, Dr. Ron Faris from Victoria.

The group was due to strike a steering committee Tuesday and embark on the developmental stage of the journey toward becoming a sustainable Learning Community – a way of meeting the future head on.

Human Resources Development Canada is putting $25,000 toward this first phase and the municipality has retained Faris for the work. HRDC will cost-share up to $100,000 per year for the subsequent three years of the process, to a maximum of $300,000.

But for the uninitiated, what exactly is a Learning Community?

As Bob Kusch, who is stickhandling the project for Whistler said, it is one of the most difficult things he has tried to explain in his life.

Faris said a Learning Community is when the concept of lifelong learning is applied to a neighbourhood, a village, a town, a city or a region. The process taps into, and uses, all the learning resources – the knowledge, skills and attitudes – of five key sectors: the civic, the public, the economic, the education and the voluntary or community sector.

It identifies and puts to use a community’s social capital, making it proactive instead of reactive to change.

It’s an assets-based approach, said Faris. And those assets are, among other things, the social and intellectual capital of the community. "They are the talents, the abilities to trust, the networking and the shared values."

The goal is to build that stock of capital and use it to better prepare a community for a knowledge-based economy and society.

"And all we know about a knowledge-based economy and society, in a sense, is that it is going to be ever-rapidly changing," said Faris. "And it is not just in the future, it is now. There is no reason to believe it is going to slow down at all because we have got these major drivers of change; globalization and the increased use of information and communications technologies and, thirdly just the explosion of knowledge in the areas of science and technologies," he noted. "For example, we have learned more in five years in areas like bio-chemistry than we had in the previous 50,000 years."

The public sector, said Faris, includes libraries, health authorities, museums, social agencies and recreation commissions. The education sector covers Kindergarten through to graduate school and university and the economic sector includes both private and co-operative enterprise.

"We are looking at the full range of resources," said Faris, "not just educational resources because that tends to be thought of as the formal school, college, university system. This is not an educational model, it is a learning model. We recognize that there are knowledge and skills worth sharing in every one of those sectors."

Faris said the Learning Communities philosophy draws on the social capital theory of Harvard’s Robert Putnam, who published a book last year called Bowling Alone. "The title sort of tells it all," said Faris.

"Whereas there used be bowling leagues and active community engagements, that has diminished significantly." Although Putnam’s critique is America-centric, Faris said one could argue that the trend is general in the industrialized world. "And what we have got to do is build the social capital, the shared values, the networking and trust that exists. I don’t want to mix my metaphors, but it is the social glue of a community as well as the lubricant."

It’s the stuff of long ago communities and tribal cultures.

Some of the First Nations communities Faris works with have even told him that this is not a Learning Communities model, it’s a First Nations model.

Faris credits Whistler administrator Jim Godfrey for having the foresight to embark on this process. "Really it was the vision of Jim. Not all people get it. They think in the old paradigm of education."

Whistler sponsored Faris on a study visit to Southampton in the U.K., which hosted a conference on learning cities in 1998. He then prepared a report which helped the municipality secure funding for the developmental stage of the process which, said Kusch, takes about six months.

As part of the process, Whistler will set its own goals. The Learning Communities team will identify achievable, measurable targets in each sector as well as targets for the good of the overall community. Faris said most communities have identified working with youth, both in and out of school, as a real priority. One of the most powerful ways of doing this is through experiential, or service-learning, said Faris.

"For example, service-learning is where a college student in a philosophy class might be dealing with the topic of death and dying," said Faris. "And in a conventional way he might write a report after reading an article in a book by Khubler-Ross on the stages of death and dying. Now, in a service-learning course, the students might read an article or books but then work in a hospice for 20 hours and write, I predict, a significantly different essay on death and dying."

The Learning Communities team works closely with the school board in this type of program, which can be incorporated into the school curriculum for academic credit. "What you are doing is applying classroom principles in your community for academic credit."

The possibilities for service-learning, especially with Whistler’s Natural Step and Healthy Communities initiatives, are rife, noted Faris. Whistler’s community school program also provides an ideal feeding ground.

"It depends on what the Whistler folk want to do," said Faris. "One dream we have, in terms of the Olympic bid, is ‘Come to the Alpine Learning Village’."

Once the developmental stage is complete, a three-year business plan will be put into place. Whether Whistler will be sustainable as a Learning Community will depend on how successful it has been in broadening its partnership base, fostering participation and assessing performance and progress.

"At the end of year three, hopefully the community and its partners will say, hey, that was a really useful process and the private sector, the voluntary sector, the public sector and the civic sector will all want to cost-share in kind or cash and carry on," said Faris. "They may decide not to."

Programs like UBC @ Whistler, which brings commerce students into the mountains, will slot into the plan, he said. "This is a model that doesn’t say everything you had before is bad and you must start from scratch. We would value and celebrate what is there and maybe add value to it. It’s not a competitive process but rather an organizing principle, like an umbrella."

Faris has been involved in the adult education field for 30 years. He was the executive director of Community Continuing Education for the B.C. Ministry of Education from 1976 to 1987. From 1987 to 1991 he worked as the associate executive director of the National Literacy Secretariat in Ottawa, part of the old Secretary of State department. He has also been very active in the Canadian Association for Adult education which has promoted the notion of lifelong learning for more than 30 years.

Two similar pilot projects are underway in B.C. in very different communities to Whistler.

One is in Lumby, a community that lost its largest sawmill operation. The resource-dependent town, like so many others in the province, has a large number of low-income residents with basic education needs.

The other is in the Upper Skeena, centred on the Hazletons, where a Learning Community partnership has the support of the Gitxsan Treaty Office. In this area, chronic unemployment, diminished opportunities for fishing and forestry and a population where 70 per cent are under the age of 30 are among the specific challenges. Already several initiatives that have immediate impact as well as long-term consequences have been initiated in conjunction with the First Nations community. One promotes literacy skills, another offers service-learning projects for youth, particularly those at risk. The third is a Learning Shop that hosts Gitxsan evenings of language and literacy, musical jam sessions for youth and new parent programs.

In one service-learning project in the Hazletons, said Faris, special needs children from an elementary school joined with high school students to plan and build a three-kilometre skiing and hiking trail. Several of the students had been on the verge of dropping out of school, he said. "Two of the boys in particular, and they have continued on to college now because it changed their attitude. At the end of the project, in Gitxsan tradition, the community held a celebration and thanked them."

Faris said the lessons learned were numerous, from project design and implementation to team building skills.

"In an ever-changing knowledge-based society, which village is going to be sustainable?" asks Faris. "One that has a permanent underclass of disadvantaged or First Nations people, or one that says, our objectives are going to be social inclusion and we are going to provide learning opportunities for everyone?

The benefits of a Learning Community, he said, are as much preventative as they are pragmatic.