Dear editor:
Perhaps if sustainability partners focused more on uniting resources and less time fragmenting communities they would not have to worry so much about their financing.
The first and most important resource they need to unite is the community and the support that comes from it. Sadly, their current leadership seems bent on political manipulation and forcing their singular view on a community. This approach has failed them entirely and largely built resentment and resistance within the community, which then fragments the community itself. To say nothing of failing to elect their favoured candidates. Hardly uniting a resource in my mind, and I don’t see how anyone could construe it as uniting anything at all.
This is but one contradiction though. Look at the Cochrane Sustainability Plan, which by no stretch is anything close to a plan. At best it is an idea book that is not filled with ‘pathways’ but really only filled with destinations. The document could be well used as an idea book to start conversations, but instead it has regularly been used to beat down the very conversations that could serve to unite a community. It doesn’t matter if it involved input from 75 or from 700 – that is not enough to force on 18,000 others what they have to do, what they pay for and how they live. It is only enough to start a conversation with those other 18,000 community members. A conversation with four likely leading questions certainly does not get started to any meaningful degree.
This group wants tens of thousands of dollars a year, but how do they spend it? Last year they sponsored a Cochrane citizen award that surprisingly was then awarded to one of their own. Does the money go to their own to convert a truck to run on French fry oil or are they paying for initiatives to benefit those that aren’t even in our community? Do we even know? Do they account for their expenditures to those who supply the financing? I’m quite sure if most in the community were asked if they would rather see their tax dollars supporting a group like Sustainable Partners United Resources (SPUR) or an established group like the Cochrane Humane Society, the community would unite overwhelmingly around those tangible benefits that help animals in need. SPUR would likely prefer the answer not focus on blogs and their version of cyber bullying of candidates they don’t favour or their depiction of anyone who disagrees with them as ‘negative,’ again quashing the very conversation that can unite the primary resource of community.
SPUR would do well to spend less time on tweeting their updates and more time updating their leadership and pick some new pathways to follow themselves. Their current leaders have taken them down some very poor pathways and until they can sort those problems out on their own nickel, I for one hope their funding is cut off entirely.
It can be hard to be part of a solution and harder still when one becomes so focused on proving they are right that they don’t even realize they have become a large part of the problem.
Jim Uffelmann
