Sunday, February 16, 2025

Juliet Grist – The economist and the village

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Serena Kirby, ARR.News
Serena Kirby, ARR.Newshttps://www.instagram.com/serenakirbywa/
Serena Kirby is a freelance reporter, writer and photographer based in regional Western Australia. With a background in public relations, education and tourism she’s had 30 years experience writing and photographing for local, national and international publications. Her current focus is on sharing stories from the sticks; its people, places and products and the life that lies beyond the city limits. She enjoys living in a small town while raising a tall teenager.

An old African proverb says that, ‘It takes a village to raise a child’.  It’d be easy to think that in today’s world, where we’ve become increasingly isolated and independent, that this adage no longer holds true. But this proverb is more of a philosophy than simply a saying as it reminds us of the importance of community and our collective responsibility to care for one another.

WA Economist, Juliet Grist, is a strong believer in the importance of community and even more so in the concept of ‘thinking like a village’. It’s fair to say she dedicates much of her professional and personal life to helping communities to not only survive but to thrive.

“I spent many years working in corporate banking and financial planning. I then shifted into regional development; that’s where I found my true passion and that was basically the first time I was actively using my economics degree,” Juliet says.

Juliet explains that economics has changed a lot since her Uni days.

“It used to be all about supply and demand; about economic growth.  In some ways it still is but in the last decade or so many countries have come to the realisation that just because you’re getting economic growth doesn’t mean your population is actually benefiting.

“One of the new schools of thought – and one I’m trying to focus on – is not what the numbers say about economic growth but what’s actually happening at the community level. This includes measuring social, economic and environmental aspects and looking at the wellbeing of the whole community. It includes whether the people are getting the basic necessities of life. Economics is now more of a social science as there’s an increased focus on social impacts.”

The majority of Juliet’s professional work is based around helping WA State and local government authorities develop strategies and plans for community development that also supports economic growth.

But Juliet is also helping her own community at the grass-roots level and is head of a not for profit organisation that fosters collaborative projects to help her local town of Denmark WA support a thriving community.

As part of her role Juliet has conducted in depth research into the wellbeing of her community and the data she’s collated has highlighted some thought-provoking realities about life in many regional towns.

With the population of Juliet’s hometown sitting at nearly 6,500 people, its size is both a blessing and a curse. Why? Because towns this size miss out on a lot of government investment due to it sitting in that space between being “too big to be a tiny town and not big enough to be a big town”.

“If you’re a very small town and something needs doing you know you have to band together as nobody else is going to step in and help you. Then, when a town gets a bit bigger, there’s a bit of a mental shift. The same things need to be done but people start to think someone else will do it. But, when everyone is thinking that way, things don’t get done.”

And this is where Juliet says the concept of ‘thinking like a village’, and realising that it takes a village to make a village thrive, comes into play. 

“We need to encourage the community to invest in itself and that means thinking less about what ‘you’ want or need but thinking more about what the other people in the community need.”

Juliet adds that this requires individuals to think about demographics; it requires thinking about advantage and disadvantage and about those that are socially excluded. But again it’s not a job we can leave to others to come along and fix. We all have a role to play and while changing our thinking from ‘me’ to ‘we’ can be hard it starts by doing something in your community that you see needs doing rather than relying on someone else to do it. 

It’s when a community is ‘thinking like a village’ that it moves from simply surviving to thoroughly thriving.

www.denmarkfutures.org.au

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