Do you know what recreation infrastructure assets you own? Do you know the financial state of your buildings? Do you know the risks associated with assets?

A new pilot program from the South East Sport, Culture, and Recreation District aimed at assisting facilities remain viable and sustainable over the long term in smaller communities.

The new Inventory Champs pilot program offers support for communities interested in developing a Facility Inventory Champion.

"It supports our smaller rural communities that have not traditionally engaged in asset management, and it's really focusing on building local capacity to engage communities in creating facility inventories for their recreation infrastructure, so for their pools, their rinks, whether it's a curling rink or a skating rink, their parks, their sports grounds," said Executive Director Joni Hagen.

"Many of our recreation facilities were built in the 60s and 70s, they're aging, so it makes it difficult to know what kind of decisions to make when it comes to upgrading those faciltiies and replacing them," she explained. "So what Facility Inventories does is it helps you to know what assets you have in your community."

She said things like the year of construction is documented, building equipment, models and serial numbers are captured, and they take photos of all the building components, so that the municipality then has a really good understanding of what the current state is of those recreation assets, and then they can make better choices in terms of those financial decisions as they move forward.

"What southeast communities have told us that one of the largest barriers to creating facilities inventories is a shortage of staff and volunteers, because our rural communities are very much dependent on the volunteer sector to run their recreation facilities, so they don't have the capacity to do these inventories," Hagen noted. "So this program provides a series of education, webinars, and mentorship, so that they can then learn the knowledge and skills to do the inventories."

She said they also will be providing some funding so R.M.s don't have to rely on volunteers to do this work.

"Communities can contract a local individual or volunteer to take on this work," Hagen shared. "So we're creating Facility Inventory Champions in every community so that they have knowledgable folks that can do these facility inventories."

Those interested in beginning the process can fill out the expression of interest document by November 15th, which can be found on the southeastdistrict.ca website, or they can call Joni at 306-842-2188.