Quality of Island Life Cooperative

This is the draft description of The Royalty Oaks Project. It was first prepared as a presentation proposal for the reboot conference in June 2009, and is included here as a starting point only.

The Royalty Oaks Project of the Quality of Island Life Cooperative is an effort to bring together disparate groups in an effort to link the health of an important forest to the health of a neighbourhood with social and economic challenges.

The project, in its early stages, seeks to bridge the usual silos of social and economic and environmental and cultural and to form a broad coalition to improve both quality of life and the way it is measured.

The Forest

The provincial tree of Prince Edward Island is the red oak. When Jacques Cartier arrived in Prince Edward Island in 1534 the red oak was common in the Island forest, but in the 475 years since land-clearing and harvest of the red oak have greatly reduced its numbers.

Today the red oak is restricted to relatively small scattered patches such as the Royalty Oaks Natural Area, a 4 hectare mature red oak stand, surrounded by a residential neighbourhood called Hillsborough Park, in our capital city of Charlottetown.

Despite it’s important role as the “last surviving stand” of red oaks, which should make it valued and sacred provincial treasure, the Royalty Oaks Natural Area has, despite the efforts of community and environmental groups, in recent years become neglected and undervalued: one local resident described it simply as “the way to cut through to the KFC.”

The Neighbourhood

Meanwhile, people in Hillsborough Park are working to engage the youth of the neighbourhood: the Hillsborough Promoters project aims to “build a social support network that will offset some of the significant issues youth face as a result of poverty, family stress and lack of support and services.”

It does this through projects like Hillsborough Helping Hands, a youth group for 8 to 13 year olds, and by working to bring additional resources for youth into the community.

The Coop

The Quality of Island Life Cooperative seeks to “develop indicators through a process of community participation and formal research, with the aim of enhancing and monitoring the quality of Island life.” In less formal terms that means that we seek to develop ways of measuring quality of life that supplement the usual economic and employment measurements. “Monthly Housing Starts” might be useful for some things, but it doesn’t tell you much about how happy people are.

We are a small non-profit cooperative of 30 shareholders with limited resources, so we seek out projects where we can bring together others, acting as a catalyst to action and injecting our alternative metrics work into the mix.

The Project

The fate of the people of Hillsborough Park neighbourhood and the fate of the Royalty Oaks forest have not, to this point, been addressed as a set of common and related challenges: the former has ended up in the social problems category and the later in the environmental problems category.

With the Royalty Oaks Project, the Quality of Island Life Cooperative seeks to tie the health of the community and the health of the forest together, essentially using forest health as a metric to measure community health and vice-versa.

We’re working to bring neighbourhood groups like Hillsborough Promoters and Hillsborough Helping Hands together with groups working on environmental and watershed issues, forest health and, even more broadly, the arts, heritage and culture, in a long-term effort that we hope the by-product of which will be an healthier community and a healthier forest.

This is not a research project, nor an exercise in theory: the issues facing the community and the forest are real and pressing and demand grounded solutions.

It is, in other words, about action: how can small groups of people work across disciplines to affect real change in novel ways.