Editor’s note: Earlier this week, journalist Colleen Dane gave readers an introduction to the Comox Valley Regional Sustainability Strategy with a look into how it will effect everyday things in our lives like the contents of our refrigerators – Check it out HERE. Today, Colleen is back with Part 2, digging in to how the Valley must face painful, immediate and complex social issues including affordable housing and homelessness.

Get talking. Ask questions. Tell us what you think. This is your newsroom.

Bob has been through a lot in his life. Born to a drug-addicted mother, he was raised in an abusive foster home, spent time in jail, was in a serious car accident that killed his wife and kids and was diagnosed with MS. On top of that, he’s a raging alcoholic. And because of all that, he’s homeless.

Clinically, he’d be called hard-to-house. Bob the Bum, as he calls himself, isn’t easy to rely on and hasn’t found a place to live that suits him yet. He does like to hang out at Safeway — staff and customers there are good to him — but it’s no home. Each night he returns to a tent, packed with damp blankets, worn foamies and other odds and ends he’s collected.

As he moves from camp to camp here in the Comox Valley, he keeps in contact — raising awareness in me about what it’s like to live on the streets and how, for Bob, it’s getting worse with age. The challenges of finding food each day, of having your gear stolen, or locating a spot where you’re not bothering the neighbours and the city can leave you alone.

Housing that can accommodate even people like Bob is a key sustainability principle. It defines a community as being caring and integrated — representing the ideals of having people of mixed backgrounds living and working together “with a great quality of life in accessible and diverse neighbourhoods.”

Those words are from the chapter heading of the Social and Community Well-Being section of the Comox Valley Sustainability Strategy, which is under development now.

Along with ideas around food production, energy consumption and water-use reduction, the strategy has set strong goals for more socially-oriented aspects of the community. That includes housing, access to services and opportunity for employment.

It says boldly in the first few pages of the June 2009 draft of the strategy, that by 2050, “All residents of the Comox Valley will have access to adequate housing.” All residents includes Bob, the estimated 250 homeless people in the community and the roughly 3,100 people at risk of becoming homeless.

That won’t be easy.

The Sustainability Strategy was launched in 2007 by local governments eager to meet the changing expectations for environmentally-friendly and sustainable policies. Consultant HB Lanarc’s work on the strategy began with a Strategic Visioning Process, where working groups came up with ideals they’d like to see in the Comox Valley. In June this year, they released a draft of that phase’s document. It included high level global sustainability goals around seven topic areas including climate, ecosystems, economy and society.

Then, it began to outline the strategies for achieving those goals. They’re broken into narrower, more focused goals and then streamlined even further with objectives and staged targets over the next 40 years. Finally, it starts to lay out actual, tangible steps to meeting those goals.

There are quite a few unusual things about the Sustainability Strategy, but one of them is particularly important for the community to understand: It’s that those actual, tangible steps laid out to achieve sustainability goals aren’t all for the politicians. This strategy clearly says they can not, will not, do it on their own.

It has to have the community’s help.

For example — one of the first targets is to reduce homelessness by 50 per cent by 2020 and eliminate it completely by 2030. The actions to do that include things like assessing crisis-housing needs in the community and hold a workshop on emergency housing. That isn’t something that happens at a council table — that’s something that happens with community organizations and stakeholders taking leadership and the rest of the Valley supporting them.

There are many similarities between the Sustainability Strategy and the Regional Growth Strategy. Both seemed to really start at the same time, and they both look to the future of the valley and how the good things of it can be preserved in the uncertain future. They really do run parallel to one another — working together in a lot of ways — but there’s a few of things that makes them distinctly different.

One difference is the way they work towards future protection. While the Regional Growth Strategy will identify areas were higher density development would be suitable, it’s the Sustainability Strategy that will get below-market housing there. The RGS will outline land that should be protected for agricultural use, the Sustainability Strategy will develop local food systems that encourage increased production and consumption.

They also have slightly different time lines. The RGS is looking forward 20 years, while the Sustainability document projects 40 to 50 years. Both were built a little differently too: while the RGS went out to the public first looking for direction, the Sustainability group focused on smaller working groups including community representatives, and then took their direction to the public for feedback.

The most important difference for the community to consider though is their mandates. The Comox Valley Regional District was ordered to produce a Regional Growth Strategy by the provincial government, and once its complete, there is an already-mandated process each community will have to go through to incorporate its principles. There will be systems of mediation set up for changes. It’s formal, it’s regulated and its up to our elected officials to carry it out once its created.

The Sustainability Strategy is completely voluntary. Local government was not required to create it — which demonstrates a willingness on their part to take action. On the other hand, the voluntary nature of it means no one’s required to see it through — which makes public participation even more important.

There’s no one except us making sure that its goals are met — so it’s essential that the public internalizes the goals, finds their own connection and takes their action. Talk about how you can support the local food system. Discuss how we can get people like Bob and others off the street.

To try and get conversation going, Hans Peter Meyer, David Stapley and Meaghan Cursons brainstormed the 3×2x8 project for the blog CV2050.com. (Editor’s Note: Meaghan Cursons is the marketing and partnerships maven here at Our Big Earth. But, she wears many hats in the community as an activist, mediator and facilitator. Her roll with CV2050 did not facilitate the group’s inclusion in this story and she had no editorial control over the content of this piece)

The idea was to interview two community leaders in each of the eight Sustainability Strategy’s pillars. With three questions and no more than 10 minutes, Meyer has been able to get people talking about the potential this plan has.

The perspectives are interesting: from engineer Andrew Gower saying we could be doing much more, to agriculture economist Gary Roulston cautioning about the risks of blanket targets in light of different scenarios. Some are excited about the potential of achieving the goals, others are just excited the conversation has started — some think the targets are hard, some think they’re too soft.

The consultants keep emphasizing that this next open house, and even the completion of the strategy, is not the end, but the beginning. Even when the final draft is printed, it’s only paper until people turn it into action and results.

The time is running out though to make it a plan that the community is willing to buy into — a plan they feel they can carry out.

When they say,’ come out and see what the Comox Valley is going to do about sustainability’, it’s better to consider going to see what you can do to help the community with sustainability. This is something that people can rally around, and if they don’t, it will have been a waste.

The Comox Valley Sustainability Strategy Open House will be held frm 6 to 10 p.m. Monday, Nov. 30, with presentations at 6 and 8 p.m., at the Comox Valley Regional District boardroom. For more information visit www.comoxvalleyrd.ca and www.cv2050.com.

Colleen Dane is a journalist in the Comox Valley and a self-diagnosed News Nerd. She’s lived here for only four years — but with deep family connections in the Valley, she’s awfully attached to the area and what happens to it.