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TORC Conference Blog

Sorry this took o long to get up. Anyways last week I had the pleasure of attending The Ontario Rural Council’s (TORC’s) 2008 Rural Development Conference. The theme of this conference was “Leading the Rural Renaissance”.
On the first day of the conference, last Tuesday, there were special sessions for youth in the morning. We started the day with a quick talk by a really energetic and engaging motivational speaker. I don’t know if a motivational speaker is supposed to make you want to pack in school, but I really quite enjoyed him and based on the audience response everyone else did as well. This was followed by a group of concurrent workshops. As the theme of the youth portion of the conference was on youth employment in rural areas, there was one workshop (the one I attended) on networking. It was like speed dating and it was nice to meet a wide variety of people from homeopaths to engineers to authors, but I was not really sure how to approach things because I was not looking for a job, and I certainly wasn’t looking for a job in rural Ontario (no offence to rural Ontario but I just moved and I don’t really plan on moving any time soon). I used this opportunity to informally talk to those I was meeting about TakingITGlobal and to learn about their organization, or profession. The other workshop going on at the same time was podcasting which I heard was really interesting. After this we broke into small groups to develop ideas on how to lead the rural renaissance. We did this by identifying the main challenges faced by rural youth, what can be done to overcome these challenges and how we can go about getting that done. At first I was really shy and did not feel like I had anything to contribute at all. I have never lived in the country. I have lived in a small town, but it was right beside a big city and was more or less a suburb. But eventually after listening to some of the other youth talk about their experiences I realized that the challenges that rural youth face have a great deal in common with the challenges that urban youth face. Transportation, lack of anything other than McJobs and stigma against the trades/college were some of the key challenges highlighted. Some of the ideas on how to overcome challenges included offering entrepreneurship grants and support, having mentoring programs where youth can “learn the ropes” from an established leader in the town’s business community and promotion of the trades and college as viable alternatives to university from middle school on.
After the youth session, the main conference began with a very interesting keynote address from Dr. Greenwood. Because of the weather he was not able to get into Ottawa from Newfoundland, but they hooked as conference call up to the speakers. This was really neat and something we should keep in mind for meetings that we have glitches with. I did ask the tech crew how they did it and it’s really simple. This was followed by another workshop session. I attended a workshop session on how to start Youth Councils. As a teenager there were many attempts to start a youth council in the City of St. Catharines and though our neighbouring municipalities were successful, we were not for the longest time. After hearing these passionate and dedicated youth speak, I have come to the conclusion that youth councils are easier to set up in rural communities, because generally the mayor and local government is more accessible, but they are absolutely essential in both urban and rural areas. This session was lead by the YNOT committees from Simcoe region. I plan to contact their adult mentor, who does not really have a strong role in the committees which operate very autonomously, to talk to him about the sort of tools that TakingITGlobal can offer the groups and the kind of connections that we can help them make.
I was unable to attend the second day but the third day of the conference was also very interesting. There was a keynote address on rural poverty and a workshop on e-business and the importance of broadband in rural communities, which I think CLCers can defiantly agree is a huge complication to effective communications with people in rural areas.
It ended with by far the best workshop of the conference called the 7 Humour Habits for Workplace Wellness. This guy was both absolutely side rippingly hilarious and insightful. One of the things that he said that stuck out the most is that that it is most important to relax when you don’t have the time to relax. He also had us practice saying no. He talked about how it is rather funny that we hear the word “no” thousands of times as children and young people but when we get to be adults we are terrified of using it ourselves. Sometimes we just have to say no, draw the line somewhere and stop taking on things that we really can not handle.
One of the things that I noticed with the youth session on Wednesday is that there were two very separate categories of youth… young professionals either finishing up university or finished and high school kids. It was really cool to see both groups interacting with one another and working together on the same level to solve problems relevant to rural communities.
I would also like to thank the northern Ontario futures economic development group as their staff team kind of adopted me on Thursday. At a big conference with a lot of people that you don’t know or have much in common with, it can be very intimidating to talk to people, but they made it really easy. They gave me people to sit with and joke with and brainstorm with.
Overall I am really glad that I went to this conference because it gave me the opportunity to go way beyond my comfort zone and meet really different people and understand the problems of rural youth.

March 28, 2008 | 10:39 AM Comments  0 comments

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