Plenty still on tap for SouthGrow Regional Initiative in 2021

“We’ve got two potential projects that are sitting in bureaucratic inboxes waiting for approval. A regional import replacement program, which I’m really hoping gets off the ground. It’s shop local for industry basically and the next stage for labour market work following on our skills gap study we did last year,” added Casurella, who also touched on the benefits tourism can bring to the province.

“Tourism should never be ignored. It is one of the fastest-growing economic sectors based off of fundamental, large-scale macroeconomics. There’s growing populations worldwide, but more importantly, there are more people than ever that are entering the global middle class and they want all the same things that we want. They want to travel, they want to see the world. And to us, it’s just the Prairies, but to them, it’s the new, it’s the alien, it’s the exotic. The more experiences we can offer for the Prairies, the better.”

With plenty of projects on the go, Casurella also shared some of the organization’s challenges moving forward.

One of the biggest things for SouthGrow is the continued sustainability of the organization.

“We took that 50 per cent cut. Between our members and the government of Alberta, we got about $100,000 in operating right now, which is not enough for what we operate at. The board voted to take money from our reserves, which thankfully have been fairly healthy, for last year and for this year. We’re currently at 50 cents per capita. There’s a committee that’s meeting this week to discuss the options for what we do in regards to sustainability,” he explained. “We feel we have a very strong value offering for our communities. For example, I’m bringing in $100,000 plus a little bit of extra fees this year as our base funding model and $50,000 of that is member contributions. Our leverage ratio is, I think, 31-1 this year. We really do turn that money into massive value that goes into projects for the region. We also appreciate communities are making very hard choices with the looming cancellation of MSI coming up.”

With municipal elections coming, Casurella explained what challenges that brings to SouthGrow.

“The other challenge is new councils. SouthGrow is a hard thing to understand for new councillors, it’s not tangible. The value proposition and the ethic of what’s good for one is good for all is something that really has to be shown, learned, and described. The thing we have seen across the region is we’re probably going to have a huge council overturn, which for an organization like us that relies on that understanding of what we do when it doesn’t impact you on your day-to-day basis, that’s a challenge. We’re probably going to have a huge turnover of our own board as well.”

SouthGrow is also exploring and planning how to funnel stimulus funding to various projects in the region.

“Basically where I’m sitting right now, there’s a fire hose pointed right at us and with this federal money that is being hosed down to the local level. The problem we have is moving all the money through us, we cannot move it fast enough because there’s so much coming down the line. The problem for us is we can’t open our mouths wide enough to take it all in. I don’t have enough capacity to go and get all the money that’s flowing downhill.”