Blog from the heart & tip of Skåne

Every year, we within Leader meet engaged people who want to develop their community, create meeting places, strengthen the community, or find new solutions to local challenges. Most of them probably don't even think that their idea can spread across the country.

This is just the beginning of our journey!

Summary and pictures from the window renovation workshop at Anna Tengberg on June 13, organized within Find Home in My Northwest.

Conditions that should be equal for all are often not in everyday life – ”One size does not fit all”

”Today we built together a small art hall, learned from each other how to cultivate in a small space and saved dilapidated, unloved houses. Tomorrow that knowledge and those networks can be crucial for how we get through serious crises.”

All people who come to us with an idea are problem solvers, innovators. They have thought of an improvement that makes their place just that – better.

If I look at my company, at our expertise and the methods we use, we could salt and cold-smoke meat in under ONE HOUR so that it will last for several years at room temperature. Completely without electricity, without transportation or other factors that may not exist during a crisis.

”If we do not have a place to operate that is also seen as valuable to invest in, and we are stripped of the opportunities that rural development through the Leader method offers – who takes responsibility for what we people outside the cities need?”

”Human ecology and the Leader method share the same thought – to start from the bottom and to gather different perspectives around the same table.”

”The hello index is about the degree of ”hello” in your place. It says a lot about how welcoming and pleasant your place is perceived.”

Find home. What does it really mean? Now that I stand as the project manager for the project Find Home in My Northwest, it feels like a reasonable question to try to sort out.

”And that’s how it is, dog. A leash is never just a leash but a bond between us.”

During our visit we discovered many parallels to our work, but also several differences. We were impressed to meet so many engaged people and to see how the LEADER method in Sweden is practiced.

”After 35 years. I wanted to go home. Now it was enough. From the Sörmland forests and the deer and the ducks, something shifted. We drove past a plot in northwestern Skåne and found a forever home.”

”Yes-a!” say the visitors. ”How do you have it with electricity?” We Skåne residents must admit, that electricity, we have. Just like in the central town. ”Oh,” say the visitors. ”But water and sewage, that's really hard to get?!”. Well, yes, we have that too.”

”For me, family is everything. When I lost them, I lost my direction. But I decided to turn it around. If I could just do the opposite of everything I had done before, maybe I could win them back. And thus the idea for Trygg Rätt was born.”

2013 the project was over. And there it could have ended if it hadn't been for a number of passionate individuals who continued – fantastic people from the local heritage association and the nature conservation association. Together we have put in thousands of hours of work.

”You buy meat from the farmer in the village. You use your neighbor who is a carpenter when you need to renovate. You support local trade as much as you can, and create initiatives together in many different ways. This creates small local cycles that benefit both us, the environment, and the economy right at our feet.”

”One of the exercises was to assess the organization's work with youth participation. It went so-so – most of us land in that we talk a lot ABOUT youth but less WITH youth.”

A then 31-year-old woman – me - who in a maximum of 1,000 words is to tell 120,000 subscribers about their rural areas.

”Processing at a central authority is not the same as processing at the local place where development actually occurs.”

”One can make a contribution for a shorter or longer time in an association that engages in what one thinks is important, but one agrees to contribute with one's time and what one can for a while.”

Growing with Horsepower is a daily activity aimed at individuals with what is called Neuropsychiatric Functional Variations – NPF. What makes the activity special is that you get to be involved and influence your day.

”The most important thing I take with me from a magical and action-packed afternoon is that small and medium-sized producers are not just suppliers of food and farm shop owners; many of them are also important cornerstones and meeting places that strengthen the cohesion in their respective local communities.”

For many thousands of years, Sweden was a hunting society where the people in the place where they lived and worked also managed the game and the forest, the land and the resources. Today, hunting is governed by political decisions from Stockholm and the EU. Decisions that then strongly affect our local communities, as a regulatory framework like a template should fit all different conditions. Of course, this does not work in practice.

”I grew up in a working-class home in the countryside, in a family where basically no one had educated themselves at the university level, and the message you got from parents and relatives was that the most important thing was to get a job! I, on the other hand, had a head for reading and wanted more, but never really received any encouragement for anything other than just getting a job, anything.”

”I started to wonder if there was a countryside and if there was a need for Leader. But look how wrong my assumption was. For countryside exists everywhere. Or countrysides – for home it is one countryside and in Skåne another. But still, Leader is needed regardless.”

With us it's called support and grants, but it's actually investment money. Leader invests in really good development ideas, quite simply. (Although it's not that simple, I know, those of you who have tried to fill in budget templates, report time, assess reasonableness, requisition, etc. don't need to scream out loud. I know.)

”I had never heard of leader before I saw the ad for a business manager, but was immediately attracted to the method and the opportunities that the method entailed. Moreover, it felt like a very fun job.”