How do you make a smaller community and the countryside live and thrive?
”"Living in the countryside or in small towns has incredible positive effects for people. Community comes naturally, people greet each other and help each other. Everyone knows someone who knows someone. When modern people in urban areas or in the city choose to find strength and peace in the forest, or watch cows grazing, there are still all of us people who live here - in the middle of the countryside.".
Society in general does not always make it easy to live the way we want outside the cities. If you live in the countryside in Skåne, you may not have a local shop, school, leisure activity or health centre in your immediate vicinity. You have to think, plan and many of us need access to a car – regardless of what environmental goals there are. If there is no local bus or if the bus or trains run very infrequently, we people would like to find other ways to access the range and services we want and need. It probably makes no difference where you live, most people want access to community services, meaningful leisure time, the opportunity to get to work and the opportunity to meet and spend time with family and friends.
What rural areas are generally good at is to live where you live. We buy meat from the farmer in the village, use our neighbor who is a carpenter when we renovate, we support local trade as much as we can and create initiatives together in many different ways. This creates small local cycles that benefit both the environment and the economy, right at our own feet.
And this is where the Leader method comes in. is so incredibly good! You look from below, you collaborate and you create locally. Maybe it's the case that the local community association in your village is looking for money to build a playground. A playground in the countryside that a municipality cannot afford to invest in, but that does so much for the little person. At the same time that the older members of a local community association get to naturally hang out with all the people who like to play. Suddenly a meeting place is created, and maybe it in turn creates ripples in the water? Such as increased community. That your own place feels even more attractive to live in. The community life may use the playground in different ways. One day someone will think that you can start an outdoor gym - and maybe build a dog run too?
Leader is simply a very fun way to work, with an incredibly competent board, which, with the best of the countryside behind it, evaluates and makes decisions that make our places on earth even better.”
Max Persson. Member of Leader Skåne Mitt Nordväst & Leader northwestern Skåne with Öresund. Runs Bjärhus Gårdsbutik in Klippan together with his partner Joel Mattiasson