September 17, 2010
This week, we heard a lot about the Barn Raising spirit as an essential part of what this community is about. This spirit is taken from the Mennonite tradition that requires and expects a community to come together to build important and lasting things.
On Monday, the seven year saga of the rehabilitation of Claire Lake finally made its way back to City Council. Five years ago, the City proposed disconnecting the lake from the creek and it was only when the members of the local community filed several orders with the Minister of Environment that Council changed its course. Since that time, design criteria were set in consultation with the community and, Monday night, Council agreed to an alternative that works, praising the spirit of cooperation that the Claire Lake Community Task Force represented.
On Tuesday, more than one thousand people gathered at Bingeman’s to praise outgoing President of the University of Waterloo and Governor General Designate, David Johnston. At each table, attendees lived the collaborative spirit by building their own barn as their centerpiece while celebrating the fantastic growth and new initiatives that the community has experienced over the eleven years of David Johnston’s tenure in this Region. As the next Governor General would say, what is in the water in Waterloo is the sense that we are all in this together and that we as a community are here to help each other.
Tonight, I attended the launch of the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery’s latest exhibits. It included “Reality in Reverse [Barn Raising]”, which flips the barn raising tradition literally on its head. A tattered Ontario barn was reconstructed upside-down inside the gallery by Ernest Daetwyler. Teetering on its roof, he asks us to think about the precarious position economic and ecological challenges put even the most optimistic collaborators.
I firmly believe that working together on our problems helps us see better solutions. But collaborations are challenging and they take work. If we don’t have everyone around that table that we need, we will also miss valuable perspectives that could leave any solution teetering like an upside-down barn.
Thinking back on this week, I am reminded that the lessons I have learned watching and working with David Johnston were key in helping me to be more patient and to collaborate better even in the most challenging of circumstances. Claire Lake reminds me that a good technical solution that misses the perspective of the community is no solution at all, and that will be in the forefront of my mind if I earn the privilege of representing this area. And I commit to always asking whether we have the full diversity of our neighbourhoods and City around the table so the barns we build together consider all of our challenges.