To Save A Butterfly Must One Kill It?
Table of Contents
Introduction
The Historic Places Initiative in a Rural Context
The Rideau Heritage Initiative: A Case Study
Sustaining Butterflies: Methodology and Approach
Community Engagement
Identifying Community Capacity
From Cocoon to Flight: Transformations to Challenges
Transformations
Four Municipality Models of Heritage Stewardship
Challenges
Understanding the Historic Places Initiative
Scepticism about the Benefits of Heritage Designation
Municipal Heritage Committees-Essential Capacity Building Blocks
Linking Heritage and Economic Development: A Double-Edged Sword
Conclusion
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Sustaining Butterflies: Methodology and Approach
The Rideau Heritage Initiative sought to integrate the recently adopted Ontario Heritage Act (OHA) amendments and the Historic Places Initiative principles and practices within existing municipal planning processes in a language communities could understand, while seeking to underscore the benefits of such an initiative. The fundamental approach included: articulating the economic benefits of heritage stewardship, the value of Historic Places Initiative as both tool for preserving local memory and its use as a management device for the impacts of heritage tourism. The keys to success in identifying community capacity in heritage stewardship rested on a viable communications and community engagement strategy.
Community Engagement
Over the course of the project, the team identified some key factors in building and sustaining community engagement for heritage stewardship in rural municipalities. They included:
Community buy-in;
Integration of heritage into community life;
Visionary leadership;
Sense of urgency about a way of life that is being lost; and
Recognition of resources, assets and values that are embedded in the community.
Key steps in successfully engaging communities and determining their capacity included adopting an informal face-to-face approach at meetings and when interacting fostering trust both at meetings and one-on-one with local heritage stakeholders. The conscious choice to use graduate students rather than government employees was to not only encourage participation by community stakeholders but also to expose the ‘new’ Heritage Professionals to the realities and complexities of rural communities. Knowledge of each individual rural audience proved crucial, as was a sense of humour and willingness to work with multiple members of a community. A week-long team road trip at the beginning of the pilot project and some preliminary research enabled the team to tailor its message to each community and assisted an engagement with community members.
Identifying Community Capacity
An initial first step was to develop a community diagnostic to disentangle present capacity from future potential. In the past, the ecological conservation of the Rideau Canal often overshadowed the importance of conserving the Corridor’s cultural heritage resources. However, the Rideau Heritage Initiative team was able to take advantage of the earlier efforts of the Rideau Heritage Network (RHN) – a group of heritage planners, volunteers and advocates – who had begun to identify specific heritage conservation needs along the Rideau Canal Corridor in early 2006. The diagnostic exercise was essential as it identified stewardship tools already in place (heritage inventories, archives, community engagement processes), as well as determined:
How Rideau Heritage Initiative objectives could be shaped in particular municipalities;
How heritage conservation principles were or could be integrated into municipal management;
What, if any, incentives were linking heritage conservation with community development;
Time management for Rideau Heritage Initiative in order to build community capacity on the ground; and
Benchmarks to measure the Rideau Heritage Initiative’s impact.
While each community is unique, the Rideau Heritage Initiative found that heritage stewardship in many rural communities was often performed not by municipal staff but rather by volunteers, who were equally passionate, committed and skilled, but often lacked the tools to connect effectively with political structures. It is volunteers that staff the principal building block in the province of Ontario - Municipal Heritage Committees (MHCs) - which provide key local advice on heritage conservation matters, such as the designation of properties, property alterations, and demolition applications.
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