The Centre for Local Prosperity (CLP) began with the Local Prosperity conferences in 2015 and 2016, where we gathered folks in Annapolis Royal, Nova Scotia and Miramichi, New Brunswick to learn about how individuals, businesses, and communities can design and implement a practical blueprint for a prosperous future and healthy local economies – a future that is cooperative, compassionate, and sustainable long-term. Economies that provide meaningful and dignified work, respect and restore ecosystems, and strengthen local communities.
In the face of rapid global change, new business models, tools, projects and policies are needed to assist local communities in the 21st century. Global financial and consumer markets, climate change, and a multitude of international trends have impacted the economic and cultural health of our communities. The past decade or more of evidence-based studies, practical local experimentation, and innovation point to two indisputable facts:
- the higher the density of locally owned businesses in a community or region the higher the local job growth; and
- the higher the degree of localization, the higher the per capita income growth
Now a registered charity, CLP continues working to further inspire, educate, and catalyze new localization and local prosperity projects, studies, gatherings, and initiatives across Atlantic Canada.
our mission
We work to empower rural Atlantic Canadian communities to strengthen their local agency for the future, by informing, building connections, creating pathways, and catalyzing new initiatives.
our Vision
We envision engaged, regenerative rural Atlantic Canadian communities, where everyone feels empowered to make meaningful change, and has equitable access to the knowledge, skills, and resources to do so.
Reconnect
Have hard conversations about big problems.
Listen to underrepresented voices, especially indigenous and First Nations voices.
Reconnect to local organizations.
Relocalize
Craft a new narrative that invites a balance between a culture of economic development and the preservation and restoration of natural systems.
Work towards a localized economy – an economy that is scaled for the place.
Regenerate
Work alongside community groups, businesses and governments to identify opportunities and assess the risks in making the shift to a new economy.
A Word from our Senior Advisor and Co-Founder
Gregory Heming
The role of municipal government is to find common ground – often within a particular geographical location – between those wishing to organize a society based on mutual aid, caring and cooperation….and those who, for whatever reason (or life story), come at all of this from a different point of view (often times a selfish, angry, bad luck-in-life, illness driven point of view). My math skills lead me to conclude that any “new society” will contain a mix of those who care and some who don’t – those that cooperate successfully, and those who are inexplicable driven by a competitive spirit that runs deep; those born just in the nick of time, and those born at the wrong time.
A municipal council is entrusted to design and fully express an organizational structure, a form of debate, that chips away (slowly it always seems) at all these differences. Over time, a community begins to unveil itself and its economy (often times these are one and the same) and a morality that was inherently there all the time: a cultural community sculpted from local stones that have been lying around for a long time.
Writer Wallace Stegner once wrote, “Culture is a pyramid to which all of us brings a stone.” And to be fully transparent he also penned, “It’s easier to die than to move … at least for the Other Side you don’t need trunks.” The end product of my point of view is, of course, that we have little idea of what a community’s future will look like.
Visionaries are by their very nature and by necessity not good at detail. Darn it. A better sense of the future is most always to be found very close to the ground – in the weeds. Or it is found in some other place, some other system, some other economy and brought home, in part or in whole, to roost.
It is the latter that fascinates me the most (and is at the core of Centre for Local Prosperity): creating a safe place for a conversation between different individuals and their ideas and experiences. A resilient community welcomes imported ideas. Then the hard work begins. A community must find the resources, energy, political system, to reshape ‘imported ideas’ to a scale and a “rightness” that fits the place. And with all this said, we would be well suited to acknowledge another snippet from Stegner, “Civilizations grow and change and decline, they are not remade.”
A short documentary, Not Beyond Hope, has been produced on Gregory’s experiences over 8 years as Councillor for District 5 in Annapolis County, Nova Scotia, and his views on local governance in our climate-altered times.
a note.
History demonstrates that vision without enlightened action is destined to lie fallow. Our hope is to discover an older grace and intelligence that binds us together in ways we could never have imagined. Once discovered it becomes the new social, economic and political narrative that restores the commons, elevates the notion of fairness, and sets a higher standard by which all progress is to be measured.