Researchers seek input on rural communities

Prince George residents can reflect back on the wildfires of 2017 when more than 10,000 evacuees took refuge here and be very proud of how the community rose to that challenge.

Around the province recently, not only were there fires, but floods that cut the top half of the province off from the bottom half when roads were washed away and the recent snow storms throughout the province presented great challenges to those who weren’t used to all the extreme weather. So how resilient are rural communities when put to the test?

Claire Styffe, research coordinator with the Rural Community Resilience Project out of the Centre for Rural Health Research at UBC, wants to know and is asking people to take part in a survey.

At first, research was focused on how rural communities were doing during the pandemic but as time passed and community consultations were conducted the research team realized not only were the communities responding well to COVID19 but so much more, Styffe added.

“We were doing this at the same time as the wildfires were going on and then the floods came so we started looking at all those factors, too and we pivoted a little bit to look at rural resilience in a more general scope,” Styffe said.

So they did some ground research and some academic research to figure out what could be associated with community resilience and then put together an advisory committee to find out what members of a community felt was important to look at and include in the survey.

Researchers built the survey with their input because there is no replacement for on-the-ground voices, Styffe said.

“So working with the committee and our background research we came up with a few things that we wanted to investigate just a little further to see if they’re associated with resilience,” she added.

The survey asks what people think about their community, if it can bounce back from tough times, is it a good place to live, and other baseline questions.

“Then we ask specific questions about their perceptions about their community on different themes, including things like emergency preparedness, trust in leadership, adequate healthcare resources but then there were other things that were included specifically as a result of the conversations with rural community members, so housing was a big one,” Styffe said.