As a familiar face in on-island food security circles, Jon Cooksey’s involvement in Transition Salt Spring’s housing summit is only surprising before you learn the gathering’s foundational forums were largely built around meals.
Tackling the island’s affordable housing issues one dinner at a time is on brand for Cooksey, as is helping to wrangle consensus from conflict. He and partner Pam Tarr organized dozens of islanders for Salt Spring’s productive food summit in the fall of 2023. So, among what grew to more than 70 participants at the Common Ground Summit April 29, Cooksey landed upon quite a group — everyone from trustees to tradespeople, farmers, planners, under-housed islanders and philanthropic leaders — all working together to find some consensus on the big questions intersecting Salt Spring’s housing, environment and community values.
But well before the summit, Cooksey said, there was a fair amount of uncertainty; there were no guarantees even those first kitchen-table meetings would bear fruit.
“There were people invited that were fairly skeptical, who have been at this for a very long time — and some that saw the system as broken and unfixable,” said Cooksey. “But at every dinner, people walked in the door, took a glass of wine and started talking — and didn’t stop for four hours.”
Cooksey chuckled. “By the end, nobody ran for the door.”
Anchoring the effort, TSS was perhaps a less obvious fit, society board chair Bryan Young agreed; but land use on Salt Spring is inextricably tied to climate action, and the TSS team has had great success with its own culture of consensus-building.
Young said the idea for the Common Ground Summit was to find some points of agreement among islanders, going into the Islands Trust’s official community plan (OCP) and land use bylaw review before it ramped up in earnest — to support the Trust’s limited-resource process, he said, by feeding it a few of the island’s preferred ideas “pre-masticated” for consideration.
“We’re not going to come up with an OCP,” said Young. “That’s the job of planners. What we can do is have ‘dialogue across differences’ in this community, sort of work that ground in advance.”
Young said TSS felt the process would be stronger if more people from different corners of the island were involved — and at the summit, he said, they saw it happen, as groups discussed and supported one another’s ideas for addressing affordable housing on Salt Spring, from diverse and often surprising directions.
“It was beautiful, seeing how people from different sides of these discussions interacted,” said Young. “It feels like it’s taken this whole discussion to a new level — one of peace and curiosity, rather than animosity.”
It was a challenging but inspiring event, Cooksey agreed; he said building the day’s sense of collegiality — among islanders who had a history of frank disagreement with one another — was made a lot easier for having those dinners beforehand.
“These were all people I liked,” laughed Cooksey. “By the time we got to the summit, most of these 70 people were literally my friends — so I was able to say to each one of them, ‘if you’re mean to somebody today, remember: they’re probably my friend.’”
The tabletop groups were presented with more than 60 ideas gleaned from those dinners, and around the room’s walls, using coloured dot stickers, participants tagged their favourites — a “dotmocracy,” in the parlance of facilitators. Notably, Young said, almost all of those ideas had some level of support — as if indeed islanders might have a few ideas in common after all.
“They all love the environment, they all care about the community,” said Cooksey. “They all want housing in the right places. It’s evidence of people agreeing on the shape of a problem, something they all have experienced.”
And remarkably, a few ideas emerged as clear favourites, according to Cooksey and Young. A rezoning and redesign for Ganges was popular, finding ways to expand commercial and industrial spaces; attendees liked clustered housing, light on the land and potentially highly affordable; and there were a lot of green dots around creation of a nonprofit housing association — a central one-window hub for development, support and management of affordable, environmentally sensitive housing.
And perhaps, even for financing.
“Imagine something like community bonds partially funding these projects, where you create local ownership of this issue,” said Young. “Getting buy-in on affordable housing — quite literally — within the community.”
“That’s one of the next dinners,” joked Cooksey. “Hopefully, these things will arrive; we’ll see better zoning in Ganges, we’ll have a housing association and alternative financing to feed that housing association, and we’ll have better interface with all these government officials we’ve gotten to know.
“We do need to build trust between ourselves first, so that all these parts can work together,” he continued. “And it’s started; it’s happening.”
For more information or to join the ongoing Common Ground process, visit transitionsaltspring.com. Salt Spring’s OCP/LUB review can be followed at islandstrust.bc.ca/island-planning/salt-spring/projects/salt-spring-official-community-plan-review/.
