City outlines advantages of advocacy framework

By Lethbridge Herald on September 7, 2022.

Herald photo by Al Beeber A small homeless camp is seen nestled in the hills just off the Crowsnest Trail south of the City of Lethbridge Electric Operations an RV business. Housing and homelessness are among the issues that direct advocacy plans address.

Al Beeber – Lethbridge Herald – 

Advocacy is one of the components of city governance and on Tuesday that subject was addressed at a committee meeting of city council.

Carly Kleisinger, the City of Lethbridge administration’s chief of staff, talked about the city’s advocacy framework with the Advocacy Advisory Committee of Lethbridge city council.

That committee consists of chair and mayor Blaine Hyggen, deputy mayor Jenn Schmidt-Rempel and acting mayor Belinda Crowson.

The committee unanimously accepted her review as information.

The advocacy framework was approved during the last city council’s term last fall, the meeting was told.

According to that framework, the advocacy has several principles. They include:

* Leading, guiding and ensuring advocacy efforts are focused and aligned based on clear priorities set by city council.

* Relationship-building with local, regional, provincial and federal partners.

*  Showcasing and promoting our city and region where opportunities arise.

*  Championing the City of Lethbridge brand.

* Advocating locally and regionally on Indigenous, transportation, economic, agricultural 

and other related topics as required.

* Advocating on emerging issues and trends as required.

Its responsibilities include:

*  Establishing clear priorities for advocacy on an ongoing basis.

*  Assigning leads for advocacy on emerging issues as required.

*  Ensuring City Council as a whole is updated on key initiatives as required.

*  Coordinating advocacy efforts with administration and city partners.

* The mayor, by position will be the City of Lethbridge advocate, but advocacy will be a shared effort across all of city council in a coordinated way.

“As we go down this advocacy journey we thought it would be worthwhile to go take a step back to the framework that council had approved last year and just have a bit of discussion on it because quite a few things have changed since then, said the chief of staff.

The document “was intended as a framework for council to then build upon,” said Kleisinger, noting the initiative was primarily led by former councillor Jeff Coffman with the intention of having something in place stating principles and responsibilities of the committee to make sure they aren’t lost moving forward.

“Fast forward almost a year from then, quite a few things have changed and one of them is that we’ve now hired an inter-governmental strategist whose focus is to take what comes from the advocacy committee and then action it from administration,” said Kleisinger.

She pointed out that the present council put in advocacy priorities as part of its action plan “so we’ve created a really strong roadmap to say ‘these are the things that are important to us’ and given administration” a direction to move forward with a lot of the items in that plan.

Crowson said other communities are good at using elections to help with advocacy, creating websites to encourage residents to act during elections and wondered if that’s outlined in the advocacy plan.

She cited housing and airport grants as potential items that could be addressed through community advocacy.

Kleisinger responded, saying “this advocacy framework was a really good start and that’s what it was intended for. Let’s not lose this with a new council – we’ve got some people who spent four years or more really saying ‘I wish we would have been better at this, I wish we would have done this differently’ and so that’s all this is. I would say to you we do have a lot of good knowledge and information we could add to strengthen it.”

Crowson said the provincial and federal governments hear often from the City but it’s different if they hear from community members who can make the local voice louder.

“There has to be a way to encourage that, how do we make it a community advocacy?” she asked.

Kleisinger said the framework “is the ‘why’ and why council wants to advocate, what are your principles, what are your responsibilities. One of things that it’ll say as well to Alberta Municipalities and Team Lethbridge is the ‘how.’ And that’s where we’ve been working behind the scenes on direct advocacy plans, some directed by council for housing and homelessness and then others that we know just need to be done as part of family physician recruitment.”

Team Lethbridge is a group of community leaders representing numerous different organizations interested in raising awareness about how the city contributes to the province.

“So we have this framework in place that our goal would be, with the will of council, that we would make it a little more robust, have it a little meatier. But then we would also, any subject that you identify as something that you want more action, not just the principles and responsibilities, we would have a plan. And so the plans that we have in the works that would complement this framework is family physician recruitment and retention, ambulance dispatch and ground ambulance” as well as support for affordable housing and wastewater plant expansion, said Kleisinger.

“Those are the ones that we are currently working on.”

In response to a question, Kleisinger said the City is fairly new at formalized advocacy but in terms of owning and naming it, the committee was meant to be ad hoc and just recently became permanent.

When it comes to doing advocacy with the province, Kleisinger said if all the mid-sized communities get together and take a stand on something that benefits them, “that’s a lot of the population of Alberta. That’s a strong group . . . we do need to be working with those groups. All the inter-governmental people need to be working together and I think even more specifically Lethbridge because we’re farther south and we don’t get the luxury of driving 15 minutes into Edmonton to have these meetings.”

“We have to kind of be a little bit louder down in the south to make sure” the city isn’t forgotten because of its geographical location.

Hyggen commented on the population of mid-sized communities, stating “this advocacy work is strength in numbers…it’s not one community, it’s multiple communities…the majority of them, we have similar questions, concerns, issues with our communities,” said the mayor.

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