Photo by Chris Hammond Dr. Robert Greenwood

By Deborah Inkpen
Memorial University’s newly established Centre of Regional Development Studies (CORDS) will co-ordinate and facilitate the university's educational, research, and outreach activities in the area of rural and regional development. Approved by Memorial’s Board of Regents in October 2003, CORDS’ mandate includes the development of academic programs relating to regional development, such as developing training programs targeting the province's growth sectors, which could be delivered at Memorial's Grenfell College and St. John's campuses, or through distance education.

CORDS will also take a role in matching the needs for research with graduate programs and research centres and play a co-ordinating and informational role for the university’s many outreach activities including the development of work term opportunities in rural Newfoundland and Labrador. The centre will facilitate partnerships within the university and with other organizations and identify funding from external agencies to support these activities. It will encourage and advocate research in key areas including tourism development, regional labour market development, new fisheries, small-scale manufacturing and transportation. CORDS will also act as a broker to link Memorial’s capacity for outreach with the community.

Dr. Robert Greenwood has been appointed director for CORDS. Reporting to the vice-president (academic), Dr. Greenwood will also work with a board of directors representing the university and external stakeholders.

“CORDS is a response to the university’s Strategic Framework of 2000 and to the Royal Commission on Renewing and Strengthening Our Place in Canada,” Dr. Greenwood said. “While CORDS is not a centre in the physical sense, it is a service that will respond to the demands and opportunities presented by the province’s geography, culture and economy.”

Prior to taking up the position at Memorial, Dr. Greenwood operated a consulting business and served as a director and assistant deputy minister of policy in economic development departments in Newfoundland and Labrador and in Saskatchewan. He was vice-president, Corporate Development, Information Services Corporation of Saskatchewan, and was founding director of the Sustainable Communities Initiative, a partnership of the University of Regina, the City of Regina, and the National Research Council of Canada.

In Saskatchewan, he led the development of the provincial economic strategy. In Newfoundland and Labrador, he was director of research and principal author of the 1995 Report of the Newfoundland Task Force on Community Economic Development, titled Community Matters: The New Regional Economic Development. He led the process to establish Regional Economic Development Boards in 20 Economic Zones, based upon the recommendations of the Task Force. He also led the development and co-authored A Strategy for Small-Scale Manufacturing in Newfoundland and Labrador, which was launched in 1999.

Dr. Greenwood holds a PhD in industrial and business studies from the University of Warwick, England, which he attended as a Commonwealth Scholar and an Institute of Social and Economic Research Doctoral Fellow. He was Newfoundland’s representative on the International Advisory Board of the North Atlantic Islands Program and co-edited Competing Strategies of Socio-Economic Development for Small Islands, published in 1998. He has taught, consulted, published and presented extensively on community economic and regional development, strategic economic planning, sectoral and cluster development. He is president of the Canadian Rural Revitalization Foundation.