2005 Rural Partners Forum
Keynote address by David Beurle, accompanied by PowerPoint presentation
Thank you. It's just fabulous to be with you. Just so you know this is my first time in North Carolina and my experience so far, hey, all right! I want to start with a piece of trivia. Most of us were raised with the notion that if you dig down into the ground you'll come out in China, correct? Well it just happens that if you dig down in North Carolina and keep going, you'll come out within a couple hundred miles of where I live in Western Australia. Kind of fascinating to think that my family is standing the other way up, isn't it?
I was back in Western Australia just last week and was facilitating and speaking at a conference that was about small towns in our state. And why I'm telling you that is that the issues that you're dealing with aren't unique. Most rural areas in the populated world are dealing with this whole issue of what's our future for rural communities. Now you have your own unique set of challenges that are challenges in the face of most rural towns around the world. My country and yours and others.
I've devoted about the last ten years of my life to really trying to understand what communities can do that are going to have themselves thrive. I often hear people talking about having small towns survive. Well, quite frankly, I'm not interested in that conversation. Survival sounds like hard work to me. But if you want to talk about how do you have your communities be vibrant, prosperous, thriving, fantastic places to live, I'm interested in that conversation. And I've spent my time looking at the difference in communities that are either thriving and prospering or communities that are either stagnating and dying. And those options seem to be out there. Now if you look at those communities, what do you reckon is the most fundamental difference that determines whether a community is on a path for thriving and prospering or stagnating and dying? Interestingly, it seems to be the commitment of the people and how they organize themselves and how they work together to fulfill that commitment they have for the future. Sometimes people think, well, we're close to an interstate, or we've got this manufacturing plant or we've got that. It never is. It really starts with the commitment, the vision and the way the people in the communities work together. Now I say to people in communities in Australia, I say, listen, the truth is the Prime Minister of Australia doesn't care about your town. Now, I don't know your president, but I can assure you George W. Bush does not sit bolt upright in the White House bed at 2:00 in the morning and go, "Snow Hill, North Carolina, What am I going to do?" He's just not, right? You got a mental picture of him doing that, didn't you? He's just not going to. And the truth is that the future is really only in the hands of the people who choose to make that particular community their home. And really no one else much cares. (See, I'm going to pick on Snow Hill, right?) If Snow Hill disappeared tomorrow, who would really care? Well, you'd hope the people in Snow Hill, right? But the neighboring town might go, "It's a shame about them, I hope we're not next." But that would be about it.
Now I'm going to talk about small communities, because that's my kind of passion, that's what this conference is about. The foundational step is to get, well, if there's going to be a future, it's going to be the future we create. There are lots of resources out there that can support us but it's got to be the future that we create. I also want to talk a bit about what I think is really pivotal to having communities really create this future and prosper and I want to talk a bit for a moment about what I call the difference between the context in a community and the content in a community. So we probably know context and content and what they mean. In a community setting, how I describe that is the context in the community, it's like the background, it's like the environment in the community. The things that would be in the context might be the vision that the community has. That might be people's attitudes or the culture of that community. The content is the stuff the community does. The projects. Now, often I notice the community people are, you know, anybody who's lived in a rural community knows we're good at getting stuff done. So we tend to leap to the, "Oh, we're in trouble, we need to start some projects and get some stuff done." However, very successful communities take a lot of care and attention in creating the right context in their community. And the relationship between the context and the content is extraordinarily powerful, much more powerful than I think we often consider. I'll give you an example. This lady here sitting in front of me. If I walked up to you and we're in a night club, the ball spinning, the lights are flashing, music is playing, people are dancing, having a great time, right? And I said, "Excuse me, would you like to dance with me?" Well, who knows, right. You might say yes or no. I might get lucky, you might say yes, right? But I would at least make an appropriate invitation in that environment or in that context. Now, if I walked up to you broad daylight, middle of the day, outside the post office downtown, Raleigh, and I said, "Excuse me, would you like to dance with me?" 9-1-1. But notice my action was no different. See my action was, "Excuse me, would you like to dance with me?" Consider that the environment or the context has a lot more to do with the outcome of our actions than the actions themselves. So one of the things successful communities understand is that, if they are going to go to work on having successful things happen in their community, they are going to have to create the right kind of environment, the right kind of context in their community. Now, one of the things I love about coming to conferences like this is that whenever you have a large group of committed people come together around an important topic, whatever that would be, but in this case, it's small towns in North Carolina. Whenever you have a large group of committed people come together, there's the possibility, the potential, for some new thinking to emerge. Because we're dealing with issues that are going to require new thinking. Now you could hear in those videos, which are so great to watch, so inspiring, you could hear a new possibilities for what rural communities could be. How they could operate. You can kind of start to hear that just emerging. You could also hear this afternoon, with some of the mayors talking. This is potential for us to totally rethink and reinvent what communities are about. How they work. And how do they create the future that they want for themselves. I want to show you something that to me crystallizes some of this as simply as I can. As I said, I work with hundreds and hundreds if not thousands of rural communities. And, often when I go into a rural community, they look like this [referring to a slide showing arrows moving in different directions.] Committed people who are unfocused. So I consider each one of those arrows is an organization or a group or the city board, or the service club. They are groups of committed people who come together around some issues they see as important. However, a lot of communities are going to look like that [referring to a slide showing arrows heading in the same direction]. Now, highly successful communities create this kind of phenomenon. The same groups of committed people, but are operating in a fashion that I say or describe as focused. Now, if you were to think about, just for a moment, small towns in North Carolina, do you think the small towns that we're talking about, concerned about, interested in, in this state are operating more like which? The way most communities are... unfocused. What's the problem with that picture? We don't quite know where we're going, so we don't really know if we're making progress, because there's often, a lot of wasted resources; things get done, undone. There are potential conflicts in the community. I've seen these really fascinating examples of small towns; I saw one in Washington State. It was a small agricultural town, and there were two groups in the community that were working on economic development. One group had a vision to restore the downtown, have it kind of be a quaint agricultural area, Lavender festivals, all that kind of stuff. Another economic development group wanted to demolish half of the main street and build a Wal-Mart - both valid economic development strategies. But heading in diametrically opposed directions; a lot of potential conflict. Now, the analogy I use with this is it's a bit like in this country you have, what, eleven players on your football teams on each side? It's a bit like having 22 players out on the field just playing their guts out. But really giving it everything they've got. But they all think the goal post is a different direction. It's just as fascinating a game to watch. It really isn't, right? So the challenge then, for communities, is to create the [focused] phenomenon because when this occurs in a community, the unimaginable becomes possible. Now, and time permitting, I want to show you some examples of communities that I say have accomplished that and see what they've accomplished in a very short space of time. Now, there's only one thing that will create that kind of phenomenon. The only thing is they all know where they're going. There's like a common set of goal posts. And in a community environment, you would say that is the vision, the shared vision of the community. Now we heard Billy Ray in those videos and this morning to about this notion of vision. Billy Ray talked about the leaders that came together in the focus groups said, "We need to have a vision." You people also talked about we need to work together. Well, you've got to know what you're working together on. See communities that create a powerful vision that becomes the combining force for all those committed people in that community. And it unleashes something that's just beyond our imagination. If you've ever been into a community that's operating like that you will be just knocked dead by the spirit of people, by how thrilled they are by what they're accomplishing and also importantly by the level of participation of people in the community - communities that are highly successful. One of my measures of a successful community is to what degree do they have volunteer participation. Highly successful communities that accomplish that will often have, believe it or not a hundred percent volunteerism. Why do they do that? Because there is a game in town that people want to play. So in the level of context for a community, part of it's got to be this common vision. I want to also touch on and talk a little about culture. I haven't heard anybody talking about that yet, but we're on a bit of the way through. I'm sure we all know the importance of having a "can-do" culture in a community. I'm sure, don't you have that expression here, people talk about what kind of community is it - is it a get-up-and-go-one, or is it so tired, they can't fight their way out of a wet paper bag. So what's the culture? I've been working with communities in this country, working with them so that they can design vision statements so they can create that phenomenon for themselves. I've developed this process. It's a one-evening. So, three hours where a whole open community meeting is called and anybody who's interested is welcome to come. We've had up to 600 people, like the number of people in this room come to a community meeting to articulate, describe, create the vision. One of the things I've been doing in that session is that I've been asking people to look at their own town and the culture of their own town and what are the behaviors and the attributes that they believe that they're good at or they need to improve on. And I want to share those with you and you'll have to put them into the context of your state. I asked people to look at ten top attributes of communities that are successful and they rate themselves against each of those, so they get to vote. I've only highlighted six of the attributes, and I wanted to just talk about what's the standout messages from this and again put this into the context of communities that you work with or that you're a part of in your state. This is aggregated information from about 5,000 people who have done this across seven states, so it's about 40 or 50 communities. So the first attribute of a successful community is that there is a participatory approach to the community decision making. The second one is the delivery transition of power to new leaders. People rated whether they were strong at that as a community or whether they were weak at that - as in there was room for improvement. Interestingly, for delivered transition of power to new leaders, 90 percent of people across 5,000 people in all these communities have said that in transition of power to new leaders they're weak at as a community; 87 percent said that their communities were weak at a participatory approach to community decision making. The second set we're looking at is the economic environment in a community: creatively building new economic opportunity. Seventy-eight percent of people said that they were weak supporting local businesses, 75 percent of people said that they were weak as a community. Now to me this is like such compelling information about what's the state of planning a town. We're interested in communities becoming entrepreneurial, stimulating jobs, living in the 21st century, carving out their own futures, so it's good to know what's the background of what we're dealing with. See, what those things say to me is that there is an overwhelming view that there needs to be an almost a generational change in leadership in many communities. Now, I don't know about your country, but in mine, a lot of our local governments, you would probably typically say are made up of men who have been there for a fair while. In fact, some wag in our country said that most of our councils were pale, stale and male. I'm sure that's not the case here, right? We know the value of new leadership because the energy and excitement that's going to revitalize the community and be able to lead the community in a collaborative process is different kind of leadership than what we may have had in our communities 20 years ago or what may have worked in our communities. Also, in that environment, consider what the word on the street would be if some young buck said, at the age of 23, "I want to make a difference; I've taken this leadership course. I think I'll run for city official." What would people on the street say about that? "Good luck." "Who do you think you are?" "Wait your turn." You know the culture actually holds back the very new thinking that we're talking about, but what is the environment in a community where it's not working on credibly building new economic opportunities or supporting local businesses. What kind of environment is that for the young entrepreneurs? Again the question is if some young person says "I want to start this new business; it's off the wall, it's a whole new kind of concept for our community." What are people on the street going to say, then? "Good luck." They might not say it out loud, right? My point in this is that to create the kind of environment where the things that we want to see happen, happen, will require transforming the culture in communities. Starting with the context; building a culture of a can-do attitude.
I want to show you a couple of examples of what's possible when a community gets it right, when a community does the right work, works with the context, does the right projects, gets the leadership taking over properly, all that. What becomes possible? I'll show you a couple of examples from New Zealand and Australia. A little town in New Zealand called Martinborough. A bit of a story about reinventing this town. You go back 10 years ago, nothing really unique or interesting about this town. It's got a town square, a big deal, sits up in a pretty little valley in New Zealand, but every town in New Zealand sits up in a pretty little valley. So there was nothing that really made it stand out. Most of the buildings on the main street have been brought in from neighboring towns. They've been buying up heritage buildings and repopulating their main street, their downtown. The story of this town is fascinating. Ten years ago it was a town in quite serious decline. High levels of poverty, unemployment, people leaving, nothing much had happened there for a long time. There was a guy who married a girl who came from this town and each year they'd go back to Martinborough to go and visit the in-laws. In a small town that's not doing very well. The dilemma was, do we stay in the flea bag hotel or do we sleep on the floor in the in-laws' place? Finally the guy said in desperation, "Look, houses are really cheap in this town, why don't we just buy our own house and we can stay in it when we come here?" To give you an idea of real estate prices, he bought the house with his credit card. Not a boom town, right? Eight years ago, he moved back to this town with a vision to do something with a small community. Now, he'd made a bit of money, he wanted to make difference, to contribute back. So he went back to this community and he said, "Look, the challenge for us is we've got to get newer money flying through our economy." And in this region, there are wineries. He said, "Why don't we build a wine center and start to attract people to our town?" The marketing is. "Taste wines of the Wirewrappah regions in one central location." The idea was to attract people. It started to catch on. People started to come there, to go to the wine center. It had quite a bit of a reputation. He started to work with people in the town. Everybody started to align themselves to this vision of them being a bit of a wine destination. The town today has the wine center in the middle of town. There are many wineries today along the edges of the town. There are wineries that are only one half an acre or an acre of land. So the soil type that backs up the wineries is very mixed there. So there are only little pockets of it everywhere. They never used to be commercial to grow grapes on such a small area of land. But they are now all successful wineries. Here's the trick. How do you reckon they market their town? Well, consider, what's the biggest issue you face if you go away for a weekend wine tasting? Drunk driving. That's the biggest issue, right? They advertise their town, "Come and park your car, go get plastered for the weekend." Cause, quite literally, you can walk to every winery! And they have walking and riding trails, where, people go there, they park their car, and they can just wander around the wineries and have a great time. Now you can imagine if there's that many wineries, how many cafes, restaurants, bed and breakfasts, etc. that are in that town now. Every one of those wineries is a successful little business. Why? Because they're selling the wine direct to the consumer. There's no marketing cost, no distribution, no middle man. The full value of that wine goes into that farmer's pocket. However, they're also a small town, and they want to retain the character of the small town. They've turned themselves, by the way, into the #1 weekend tourism destination in New Zealand. But they want to manage the tourism because they want to preserve and protect their small town. They have this big festival each year, the 21st of November; it's actually a set day. A wine, food and music festival. Here's what they do. They close their town for that festival and sell tickets. So if you want to go to Martinborough that weekend, you've got to buy a ticket. It'll cost you 75 bucks. And it's so popular, they sell the tickets on a Ticketmaster or box office kind of outlet. Those tickets go on sale in early October, and they're sold out within three to four hours of going on sale. They make $750,000 in ticket sales alone. There are people who think, "I don't want to miss out on a ticket." They're willing to pay an extra $100 to join the Friends of Martinborough Association to guarantee themselves a ticket. They make approximately $850,000 a year just out of their membership and ticket sales. See, we would never think, we're going to close our town. You want to come here? Buy a ticket. Get in line. But it's been an enormous boon for that town. They haven't increased their population, but do you reckon they've increased their prosperity? Absolutely. Now, the key in that is they are all moving in the same direction. There was a vision. They got people working together; all the players worked together.
A little town called Hayden, in Western Australia. It's what I call a case study of a very self-aligned and an entrepreneurial community. And again what I'm talking about is communities that have got the context or the environment or the culture - very powerful at the level of the whole community. The project examples that I'm showing you aren't a one or two person-led exercise. They are a whole community participation. And I think that's the challenge. How do you mobilize and engage the entire community in a small town to be part of designing and shaping the future? They are making a very powerful statement about their town. They're saying that if you come to Hayden, you're going to have the best, most authentic, real deal experience of an Australian country town. It's in a very remote location. That's in the southwest corner of Australia. Above that is Perth, the capital city of Australia. Perth is the most isolated capital city in the world. We are more than 2,000 miles from the nearest other capital city even in our own country. Then Hayden is remote from Perth. To the east of Hayden is nothing. Quite literally, it's on the edge of settled land. It was settled in the 1920s. It's a town of about 600 people. It's not a county seat or a shire seat, it's just a little town. They've turned themselves into an international tourism destination. And this is what they did it on. They had this one rock formation on the edge of town called Wave Rock. And the truth is it's boring. It's interesting for about 30 seconds. It's the kind of natural feature you go and you get your photo taken in front of, and then what do you do. You decide to go to the pub. It's not a Grand Canyon, is my point, right? However, they have turned that into an attraction that attracts 130,000 people a year to Hayden. About one half of those tourists come from overseas. And about half of those overseas tourists come from Japan. You may wonder, why would somebody from Japan get on an airplane, fly all the way to Perth, get on a bus, drive for five or six hours through absolutely zip to get to Wave Rock? Well, interestingly, the Japanese do it, get home and think they've had a near death experience. They've kind of, like, journeyed to the far frontier and survived. And that whole tourism destination is being developed by a group of people in that community who created the Hayden Tourism Development Company. They started a number of years ago with an idea to develop new dimensions to their local economy because it's basically all farming out there, broad acre farming. It's owned by a group of local shareholders who are farmers. They now have cabins, hired vans; they have probably the best motel complex outside of the capital city. It's a $5 million complex. And they've done that all themselves. They've done it on the basis of promoting something that I think is really interesting for rural towns, country towns. They promote this notion of "The Wave Rock experience." See, when you go out there to Wave Rock, you don't just go out there to see the boring rock; you actually go out there for a two or three day package to get this unique experience of what it's like to be in an Australian town. You can have Aboriginal people take you on guided tours of the landscape. You can go to olive farms. You can go stargazing at night through telescopes. You can go visit farmers. They've created this really rich kind of experience where people get to be part of this rural community for a couple of days. And that's what makes it so compelling for people. By the way, that tourism segment is the fastest growing tourism segment in the world and those people who do embark on that kind of experience - they've got a lot of money. They are people who are traveling the world, looking for unique experiences. If you get into that game, your job as a community is to give them the best possible experience and take as much money as you can out of their wallet and they leave and feel good about it! One of the things that the guys in Hayden have been doing is a couple of years ago they built their own airport. They spent $600,000 of their own money to build an airport. Why? Because they want to attract charter flights, and they've designed it so that they're ultimate vision is to have international flights fly directly into there. You've got to remember this is 600 people, 400 taxpayers in the middle of nowhere. Now, interestingly, the company's shareholders have never taken a dividend from that business. Not one cent. Why? Well, here's what they are. They're farmers, right? They love driving tractors down in ever-decreasing circles. Because that's what we do as farmers, right? Never seem to tire of it. But that's their community development project because agriculture is worth $70 million in the Hayden area but has almost no impact on the local town. Why? Because the farmers got bigger, their services come direct from the ports, their accountants are in the capital city. But they know if they want to live all the way out there, they want to have a vibrant little community. They want to have good schools, sporting clubs. Tourism is only worth $14 million. That's relatively minor, but it's the money that drives the local economy. Interestingly, Hayden has no government employees. Not a soul, but they have 100 percent employment. Tourism alone has created 80 jobs. Eighty percent of those people are under 30 years of age that get drawn to Hayden. That's the tip of the tip of the iceberg. That's just such a fascinating account.
We heard some of the mayors talking about collaboration between towns. Coolen wanted to get in on the act, basically. They wanted to know how to get some of that tourism money flying past their door. They created this theme as a community about developing bush races and tourism related around this whole horse thing. This town is 400 people, by the way; it's the shire seat. So the shire that Hayden's is a part of. When you go to Coolen, there is some identity that the community has. Now one of the challenges is that there are tens of thousands of rural communities. How do you have yours stick in people's minds in some unique way? Then they started this project, which started spontaneously, which started with a group of young farmers in their spare time making horse sculptures out of tin cans or out of drums. They started to lay their sculptures out along the side of the road as a way to draw people to and promote their bush races. That has now become the "Tin Horse Highway." They had horses drinking beer, because it's Australia. You have zebras, and grain silos, jumping fences, etc. There's got to be at least six of those on the road somewhere. Teams of horses. It's all scrap metal. It's cheap to do, it's fun, it's not organized; it's one of those spontaneous things. Big ones, they make them out of hay bales. But here's what's interesting. They set out to increase the prosperity of their town because they wanted to do some community projects. Here's what they've done with the money they've raised out of their bush races and other stuff. They were the first community in Australia to have a community bank. That's a big deal in our country. That cost the community about half of a million dollars just to get into the negotiations with the franchise bank. They built this water park for their kids. This is a town of 400 people, probably has no more than 65 or 70 kids in the entire town. But they had a value on young people, and they wanted to make sure young people had a great time living out there. So that's a disproportionately ridiculous investment, right, for those kids? Unless you really cared about those children and their experience growing up there and that was the way for the community to say, "You know you young people, we reckon you're the best thing since sliced bread. We're going to build this for you."
The next town is Corrigen at the other end of the Tin Horse Highway. There was this committee in the town called the Corrigen Our Future Committee. They were looking at the whole future of the town. They wanted to say, well, "How do we redesign our town because it's not going too well?" They wanted to get Corrigen on the map. In Australia, we have this view that the fastest way to become famous is to set a world record. So they said, "Well, let's set a world record, and we'll become famous and then people will know about us." So they came up with the idea of setting the world record for the Dog in the Ute competition. You have no idea what I'm talking about, do you? So you know what a dog is? OK, good. So a ute is like a pick-up truck. So their idea was to have the most pick-up trucks all in the same place at the same time with a dog in the back of each one. And that was their world record attempt, right? It's ridiculous. But here's what it did. It's so ridiculous that it captured the attention of the media. Now we have three commercial TV stations in Australia that are national and that day, every one of those TV stations had a helicopter up over the town at Corrigen, filming the Dog in the Ute world record attempt. They had over 2,000 entries, 6,000 people descended on their little town. And it was the first time the town had ever had to work together on a big project. Because if you're going to host 6,000 people in a town of 500, you'd better work together. So they had the sporting club doing the bars, the Lions Club doing the gate-taking, etc. And the whole dynamic of the town altered out of that one event. Now you might wonder, "Where did they come up with that idea?" Well, in Australia, we don't have much that's unique out there, other than a whole lot of nothing, right? So the Corrigen Our Future Committee was doing an asset survey saying, what are the assets that we've got? They found one. It was this: a dog cemetery. That's the only thing that's different about Corrigen and most other towns. And they designed the whole event out of that.
To conclude, I've shown you some very powerful cases and some quirky ones as well, right? One of the things that happens when the environment in a community becomes one that's about the future and one that is a creative, innovative environment, you get crazy ideas coming out. So you could sit down and do all the strategic planning you wanted to and you would never come up with the dog in the Ute or the Tin Horse Highway. You just wouldn't, right? But those things will spontaneously emerge when a community creates a very powerful conversation about the future and people start to work together and they create and environment where new ideas germinate and flourish. So my final remark to you is if there is one thing I've learned out of working with communities all over the place, it's that the key is to create a very powerful context in the community; do the work on the environment, the culture the attitudes. And work with people so that they have that common direction and to a large degree the rest will take care of itself. And if you're in a community, you're someone from a community, that's the place to start - to start that conversation about what is our future. What's our vision? What do we aspire to? What do we want to create here that everybody can get on board with?
So, it's been great to spend some time with you. I offer you the best with all that you're creating here in North Carolina. You have such a powerful, large environment of support with your legislators, with the Rural Center. Now, truly, this could be one of the most powerful models that the world needs for how, at a state level, you can work to galvanize rural communities. So, all the best with that. It's been great to spend some time with you and thank you.
