Greetings and welcome to Friday! Wow – what a couple of gorgeous days this week! Thanks to all for a great Board of Directors’ meeting yesterday – always gets me energized and challenged! And so cool learning more about the board – who knew that Antarctica and Hawaii would come up big?

Here’s our EDALC update for the week –

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Cindy’s week:

* Continued to work my way through Enterprise Zone records. Successfully separated resolutions for each city and organized by date.

* Sent out press release regarding Toledo Phantom Art Gallery artist selection.

* Assisted with a support letter for the Arts Revitalization of Toledo (ART) Committee application to the Travel Oregon’s Competitive Grant Program.

* Did some light research on CRM software.

* Assisted with BoD meeting prep.

* Started on an updated media contact list

* Learned and laughed a lot! 🙂

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Paul’s week:

QuickBooks Online – I was able to spend a few hours doing a deep dive into our QuickBooks online and found six duplicated transactions – I pulled those out (and saved the info in case I did anything stupid – it’s been know to happen!) and WHOOSH – our QuickBooks balance and our Columbia bank balance now match down to the penny. I’m SO glad we got that sorted out – it was stressing me out for a few weeks!

ART Toledo – It’s pretty cool to hear how excited Mayor Rod Cross is about the drive towards the finish line for the ART Toledo Phantom Gallery project. This week, banners for the main Toledo Hwy 20 signs arrived as well as banners for the street light posts on Main Street. Next Friday, a small work crew will set up the galleries and the kick off will be on Saturday April 17th from 3-5pm right outside of City Hall. Not bad for an idea I pitched on an iPhone Zoom call from the parking garage at PDX a few months back!

Value-Added Member Events – Cindy and I spent some time this week thinking through the logistics of our virtual event plan and we feel like we’re close to nailing it down and making it happen. I discussed one of the sessions with entrepreneurship trainer Ryan Lilly (he was going to do a virtual entrepreneurial ecosystem talk for us) and he’s also jazzed about the new direction. Based on our BoD discussion, we’ll initially focus on the May event and both informing and providing value for our members. That will help us inform and decide on the details of later events.

Enterprise Zone – April first was the deadline to get final submissions and signatures in for new applications and exemption requests for the Zone, and we got everything off to the county assessor’s office with a couple days to spare, including an approved application for Zack and Dahl Disposal – woo hoo!

LatinX Kauffman grant application – Wiley Thompson of OSU Extension shared with me a letter of intent to apply for a new Kauffman Foundation grant to support local Lincoln County LatinX entrepreneurship development. I was able to offer some advice and additional verbiage for the letter and we discussed ways to engage with that program should it get funded.

Video Project – We continue to work on our series of videos – pulling in b-roll footage this week of Toledo, Seal Rock, Waldport and Yachats. I was even able to shoot some amazing stabilized footage at the Cape Perpetua lookout last Saturday when we took Susan’s mom there.

Strat Planning – Last Saturday, I hosted a round table at the Spring Game Designers’ Worksop virtual event – focusing on improving the strategic planning process by adding some game design elements. We had a great sessions with top designers from all over the world and I came away with some excellent new approaches that I synthesized into a new document on economic development strategic planning – I’m going to let it simmer for a week or so and then revisit it, but I think we’re onto something.

I’ve also had several meetings with Newport2040’s Leslie Palotas on how to improve community-wide strategic plan reporting via the web – turning a laundry list type of approach into a layered keyword document. We’ve got permission from Spencer at the City of Newport to take over the official hosting of the web portal of the 2040 plan and use it to test out some new approaches and hopefully grow it into a county-wide multi-organizational planning portal. Leslie is going to see if we can get plugged into the Ford Family Foundation’s Community Portal program for hopefully tech and financial support – will keep you all posted – exciting stuff!

O2IH – I’m sure many of you have heard, but if not, Rachael Maddock-Hughes sent out an email to say that O2IH has brought in a confirmed $105,000 of the needed $200,000 for the Burning Glass Blue Economy sector analysis – that is amazing news and makes it a truly Good Friday!

Susan and I were off this morning to PDX taking Susan’s Mom (affectionately termed, in an old-timey voice, as the “Widow Gibson”). We truly did a whirlwind 11-day culinary tour of the best seafood spots in the county and the winner was, in her mind, Local Ocean (though she said every place had the best seafood she ever had since this trip). So we went there at her request for a repeat performance last night after the board meeting so she could get more of their fried oysters. Super Yum!

Thanks for ALL that you are doing out there! Please reach out to me if you need anything at all. Have a wonderful weekend!

Cheers,

-Paul 🙂