I, Jackie (Radke) Haines, am seeking election to the Ponoka town council to be a facilitator of change. I am a local person, born and raised in our town.
I have over 10 years of governance experience having been the recording secretary for the Wolf Creek Public Schools board of trustees. If elected, I would foster the facilitation of governance by listening, engaging community collaboration and vote after weighing the various points of view; thereby making the outcome of goals for our community a collective to democratic action.
I have a homegrown passion for our town and I have a willingness to learn and work with council to serve this community to the best of my ability.
We are the “Ponoka Stampede” town, but we are also so much more and we need to give voice to that more. We need to promote our town to encourage young families to raise their families here. With more residents comes more business, and more recreational facilities. There are many stakeholders involved in our community and we need input from everyone. If we want to foster change to promote our town, we need to ‘think outside the box’ and sometimes that takes the engagement of the community to bring ideas together.
As leaders, we need to set goals with attainable objectives and specific outcomes; but we also need the support of our collective community in these goals. Without the support of our taxpayers, we will not be able to move forward. As leaders, we need to make and support connections with people, businesses, and community organizations to create the success we want for our town.
To put it simply; I believe in governance thinking whereby the process of reimaging and rediscovering our core values for our town are centralized in the community’s overall engagement. However, we must never lose sight of our fiscal responsibility; the responsibility to the taxpayers who make this town our town.
In researching other central Alberta communities that have experienced exponential growth, collecting a municipal census has been instrumental in the identification of what may be lacking in a town as well as providing necessary information for population based grants.
Change doesn’t happen overnight; it takes time. But in order to facilitate change we all must be open to different ideas and possibilities.
Please join me, Jackie (Radke) Haines, in my goal to “Build a Better Community Together.”