The School Fence as Promotional Opportunity

$50,000 a year should be enough to do a couple of worthwhile things to promote Goodwood Road as a destination. Maybe an ad on the back of a bus. A brochure to go in hotel lobbies. Maybe light up the street trees with fairy lights. Even in better economic times, few businesses in the so-called Goodwood Road Precinct could survive on local patronage alone, so any worthwhile promotion would aim to draw people here from all of greater Adelaide. Plus, we're on the doorstep of the CBD, which at certain times is awash with interstate visitors. Surely $50,000 could be fruitfully spent to draw people here? You would think so. And it might be if it were not for this one handicap built into the GRBA*. It is required to "involve the community"! No kidding. It says that in the GRBA Constitution, the one that was written by Unley Council.

Now I for one would love to involve the community in my business: I would like them to be my customers, and I'm happy to involve people from all over Adelaide in that role, not just Goodwood people. I am not, however, a person trained in community development. That's not what I do. I'm a bookseller. Further, I do not want my hard-earned rates handed over to a gang of well-meaning but unskilled volunteers so they can spend it, at will, on whatever they think might be business-promotiony-cum-community-developmenty things. They are retailers. They are restaurateurs. They are bakers. They are hairdressers. They are not community development experts.

Maybe Council have more sense than I'm crediting them with. Maybe they never intended  GRBA to give more than a passing glance toward "involving the community". If so, then someone should tell the GRBA, because marrying the interests of community development and business promotion together is a difficult task and there have to be better things they can do with the money than decorating a school fence. You'd be hard pressed to convince me that was doing anything to advance the interests of my business. Anything at all. Ever.


*Goodwood Road Business Association