When Fairy Lake Jobs – the first Vicinity Jobs Network search engine – was launched in 2006, its objective was to not only get people thinking about the damage inflicted by long distance commuting to our communities and the environment, but to also demonstrate that this damage can be prevented, and serve as an example of how this could be done. Fairy Lake Jobs was very successful, largely thanks to the support that it received from many York Region residents. This encouraged us to expand and enhance our services, leading to the introduction of the concept to the remaining suburban communities around Toronto in 2007 – where the initiative is now gaining momentum as well.

From the very conception of the Vicinity Jobs Network, our focus was on helping local communities to prevent long distance commuting, and on showing that its impact on people’s lives makes it a very serious and long-lasting problem that amounts to much more than a trivial “inconvenience”.

In line with this objective, we are now introducing the Vicinity Jobs blog. One of the primary goals of our blog is to help suburban and rural residents to better understand their local job markets, and share their own opinions and experiences. Another major objective is to increase the awareness of various environmental issues and the impact of long-distance commuting, as well as help people understand the reasoning behind solutions that are being proposed and their impacts – positive, as well as negative.

As is usually the case with complex problems, people often disagree about the nature, magnitude, and causes of environmental problems, and about the appropriate ways of dealing with them. Most measures needed to protect the environment inevitably involve changes that produce both winners and losers. We hope that our discussion will help people understand the issues in their complexity, with all the upsides and downsides. We are looking to raise issues and discuss aspects that are often overlooked by the mainstream media. Our hope is that our readers will also share their own views and experiences.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 10th, 2008 at 10:15 am and is filed under Announcements, The Economy, The Environment, The Job Market, The Local Communities. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.