Casurella details SouthGrow for Raymond council

Posted on December 5, 2024 by admin

By Heather Cameron
Southern Alberta Newspapers
Local Journalism Initiative Reporter

During a recent Town of Raymond Council meeting, Peter Casurella, Executive Director of the SouthGrow Regional Initiative, gave a presentation about SouthGrow Regional Initiative.

“I work for you along with 29 other communities in Southcentral Alberta to work on regional economic development projects,” said Casurella. “Those are the projects that all of our communities have a shared interest in seeing advance together with the Province of Alberta. We’re one of nine such organizations across the province. Collectively, we represent about 90 per cent of rural Albertans outside of the major census metropolitan areas.”

SouthGrow, Casurella explained, has been involved in several large-scale projects over the years.

“If you look back through the projects over the past two decades, 20 years at SouthGrow has been incorporated,” said Casurella. “You can trace the threads of the early work that was laid down by predecessors in order to really profile the opportunities in the region when nobody had really done this work before, and then to lay in place successive, year over year efforts in order to grow those opportunities. A lot of work went into those early years in profiling the new energy opportunities in Southern Alberta, and the renewable and alternative energy file turned out to be one of our biggest successes that we’ve ever had. You see all the work that was done in order to build an investment attraction piece over the years, and we’ve had billions and billions of dollars dumped into new energy projects from biofuel to solar to wind in Southern Alberta. Now, you’ve got a situation today where counties like 40-Mile County, for example, has over half of their operational budget every year. That comes from linear tax assessments on new energy projects that have come in in those last 20 years. That’s kind of the impact that we have.”

One of the largest things in SouthGrow’s current operational plan, Casurella says, is their global AgriFood marketing.

“We started laying the groundwork about five years ago,” said Casurella. “Me and some of my colleagues throughout the region and from our partner organizations got a bunch of training, and we figured out how to build global marketing campaigns and how to target successfully the managers and directors and higher-level executives at AgriFood companies around the world with our marketing. Then, we started implementing and we’re nearly at the end of our third year of funded advertising, focusing directly on those executives in North America and in Western Europe, and we’re seeing the fruits of that really come to fruition. There are more and more people who are coming through Invest Alberta and specifically interested in Southern Alberta, and any advantages that we have. Last year, we had 20 million views of our ads in North America and Europe. If you are a manager level or higher, who works in an AgriFood company and you’re anywhere near social media: YouTube, LinkedIn, Twitter, you’ve seen ads about Southern Alberta and the natural advantages we that we have.”

Currently, Casurella says, SouthGrow is grappling with provincial government relations.

“The province has announced a three-year pullout from working directly with the Regional Economic Developmental Alliances,” said Casurella. “That’s a challenge. We’ve had challenges with the funding and the partnership with the province before we’ve always been able to navigate them. This one seems pretty imposing. SouthGrow’s in a good financial position because of careful fiscal management from the board over the past number of years. We’re going to be able to operate in the way that we’re accustomed to operate right up until the end of that three years before we have to make any hard decisions, and we’ve got two and a half years left to convince them to change their minds and stay partnering with our municipalities on regional economic development.”

Casurella firmly emphasized that those who have conversations with MLA’s should make sure that rural Alberta is not really feeling the love, particularly when it comes to economic development.

“It’s great that we’re getting investment in Highway 3, but an awful lot of the other programs seem to be centralizing services into larger cities, and from a cold efficiency standpoint, maybe they’re trying to economize dollars, but then we see that our people suffer in rural Alberta,” said Casurella. “When you’re casting your long-term plans for your community, I always encourage you to think on the decades timescales.”

Raymond, Casurella stated, is a model community.

“You picked a plan a number of years ago and said, “This is who we are and what we want to be,” and you followed that plan successfully over the years, so when you look at opportunities ahead of you, obviously bringing in more residents, this is your bread and butter: focusing on housing inventory expansion so you can get a bigger cross section of people in town. It’s good to have a cross section of people in town because you still have service jobs, and you need people who kind of fill out your various demographic profiles in order to fill the variety of jobs in the community. It’s always a good idea to put in place a three-to-five-year recurring Business Retention and Expansion program. 80 percent of economic growth is going to come from investing and the people who are already here and who have already chosen to grow businesses in your town.”

Casurella explained that a Business Retention and Expansion program is a very standard economic development tool, and best practice recommends that communities pursue this kind of thing if they have the resources or time to do it. The program, Casurella explained, will allow for continued communication with stakeholders and development of future action plans through surveys of the business community to find out their struggles and how to work on improving things.

Casurella also spoke briefly on the grant advising that SouthGrow has been doing for communities. 

“SouthGrow has always advised our communities and your nonprofits on grants,” said Casurella. “We have a lot of capacity right now. I’ve got a good team that knows the grant environment really, really, really well. We’ve really put it up strong this year to all of our communities saying, “Listen, if you want help piecing together grant opportunities either for your Administration from your nonprofits, or your community associations, you can pass on our contact information to them. We’ll sit down with them, spend time talking them through the process, help them build a plan, help them find funding if it’s available for the thing that they want to go after, and really just advise them. We can’t write the grants for them, but the board’s made our capacity available to give them expert advice.”

To conclude his presentation, Casurella emphasized that SouthGrow has helped about eight different organizations so far this operational year from across Southern Alberta.

Council then thanked Casurella for his presentation on SouthGrow.