Community Development

Community Development Strategy

In creating our community development strategy, the questions are:

1. What offers the best opportunities for our community and our people?
2. How can we make those opportunities better?

Keeping these two questions in mind, CFDC has addressed the principles that:

• Small Business will continue to be the main creator of employment opportunities
• The majority of local employment creation will come from local business expansion spurred by community members
• Employment development is more likely to occur in a nurturing environment
• From an employment creation perspective, it is more effective to enhance the skills of existing business than to attract or create new business
• Excellence is always in demand
• Sustainable locally owned development generates proportionately more community wealth

Employment development is created by working with and through other groups and individuals, providing tools and resources to help others succeed. CFDC cannot create sustainable employment alone.

Employment development and a skilled knowledgeable labour force must go hand in hand.

The overall CFDC strategy takes into account broad global and national trends, as well as local strengths and weaknesses. It is future directed, intended to enable the community to respond to new problems and opportunities as they arise. The strategy CFDC employs is simple, straightforward and positively affects the social, cultural, educational and economic development needs of our community. The strategy is long term and evolving naturally from within rather than imposing short-term "fixes" upon the community. The strategy is private sector oriented and market driven.

In undertaking this process, two very basic assumptions were made:

• Whatever is not expressly prohibited is within our mandate
• Community resources, including CFDC resources are available to be used as needed