My Town

I attended a meeting the night before last in my home town that was a move by a proactive group of people to mobilise a place that at present is haemorrhaging jobs, haemorrhaging tourists and generally becoming a town where emigration, unemployment and anti-social behaviour have sadly become the social norms.

Unfortunately for me you might say, I’ve just moved back to this town, so I pretty much feel compelled to get involved and help in some way. I’ve always been a sucker for an underdog…

What struck me at this meeting, apart from the numbers that attended (well over 200 at an estimate) was the air of optimism and willingness by those present to make a change and to do something to help reverse the fortune that our poor town seems to have succumbed to. I was absolutely delighted to see it.

Because for the first time, it wasn’t a platform to moan about things; to complain that the town is going to ruins; that it’s a lost cause. It was attended by people who are genuinely interested in doing something to help, to move on from the mistakes of the past and look forward to new opportunities and new strategies.

What I also realised is that there are people in this town that are already ‘change champions’  – people that are generating ideas, turning them into real actions and achieving success. We just didn’t know anything about it until that night.

I am certainly not a tourism expert or any voice of authority on the matter, but from the experience I have gained over the past number of years I can only add this: Now that we have a ‘team’ – a group of people willing to change, and the support of the community behind it, we need to work together and help each other. We need to pool our resources, our skills, our assets and do all that we can to help break the vicious circle of unemployment by building the perception of our town as a great place to live, work and play.

Then, most importantly (because otherwise it is futile) we need to communicate it. We need to watch and learn from our neighbouring towns the art of effective Marketing & PR and embrace it. Better again, we need to be better than the rest and look at new ways to attract visitors and revenue generating resources to the town through simple, effective communication.

What seemed impossible now seems a whole lot more achievable when we start to work together and communicate don’t you think?

Gina Kelly is Account Director at Fuzion Communications