”"The first time I went to Skåne, we had winter back home in Umeå. And I mean real winter. 70 centimeters of snow and 20-25 degrees cold. I landed in what I would call spring and what they in Skåne called winter. Even then, I realized how different our realities were but how similar our challenges are.
I have now had to reschedule a trip to Skåne and am struck by the fact that here at home we have spring-winter and Skåne (in my opinion) has summer. The differences are huge in our country!
Leader Lapland 2020 has been given the opportunity to look at another countryside for two days and experience the ”ripples on the water effects” of leader. But the first thing I thought about when I arrived was how close everything is, airports, villages, urban areas.
I began to wonder if there was a rural area and if there was a need for Leader. But look how wrong my assumption was. Because rural areas exist everywhere. Or rural areas because at home there is one rural area and in Skåne another. But like hell, Leader is needed regardless of whether Malmö is next door and trains or public transport are (almost) everywhere. We need to work with the local conditions that exist where we live, work and live. Where the power comes from below and where people voluntarily work and struggle to make their place a little better. Leader is the only method that reaches all the way out to those in our rural areas. And to those who want and who make a difference! And I am impressed by the inventiveness that we have encountered these days and which I will take with me in my future leader work.
It may be careless of me to call the places we have been to ”Skåne”. It is as if someone were to go to Norrland, where would they be geographically?
And finally, I want to dispel one of my own prejudices; that Skåne is flat, because that's not true!
That regardless of the size of Leader areas, there are always "dens" even if a "Scanian den" has about 2,000 inhabitants, which is almost as many as in the entire Dorotea municipality!
That all people from Skåne are nice, because of the many nice people we have met these days.
Many thanks for these days that offered more than an eye-opening moment. And an extra thank you to Mittskåne Development for making this possible for us!”
Lovisa Westling, operations manager Leader Lapland
lovisa@leaderlappland.se
http://www.lappland2030.se