Dear member
The importance of communication and language was highlighted to me again this month. Firstly at a communication workshop with a bunch of rural leaders in Merredin and secondly at a regional development research symposium held in Perth.
The first enabled me to try and see other points of view, particularly non rural consumers. It seemed important that communication around agriculture needs to focus on food.
Not everyone understands or even cares about agriculture, but everyone can relate to food. For farmers particularly, talking about how they produce food in a way that is conscious of the environment and community also seems to gel better than talking about economics.
The second workshop was the first event of its kind, and brought together representatives from the 5 WA universities, 9 regional development commissions and the DRD, as well as yours truly representing RRR. It promised to be an interesting day.
I was blown away with the quality and relevance of the research that has been done but it was clear though that there is some work to do in improving communications between all the parties.
It is heartening to hear from academic participants how they valued the opportunity to share their research and from the practitioners the opportunity to query the research and make suggestions.
I found myself representing regional WA when I was asked a few times "why do you live where you live?"
A question I often get asked. I found myself answering immediately espousing everything that is good about where I live. This prompted a rare Facebook post that received a lot of positive feedback!
When I turned the question around (something RRR people don't get to do very often) I found that what I spoke about was not so different to my city counterpart. Once again, it came down to language and being clear in your message.
I hope this message finds you well, and I encourage you to communicate in anyway you can to your city counterparts to talk up the opportunities in RRR areas.
Renee Manning, Reference Group Member, Merredin
