Greetings and welcome to Friday!
Thanks to all who could make it for another great Board of Directors meeting – thanks so much for sharing your wisdom and insights!
Here’s our EDALC update for the week:
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Sarah’s Update:
This week started off with posting about the Beach, Bike and Blues Festival in Waldport happening at the end of this month, with a special shoutout to Paul because he is the Blues music performer! After that I continued working on formatting our brochure to be handed out to businesses during International Economic Development Week.
I also updated our “opportunities for entrepreneurs” slider because one of the classes took place last week, so I added another available class from the SBDC, an online course on business technologies for the beer, wine, and cider industries. Afterwards, I reviewed the Oregon Coast Blue Economy Analysis scope from ECONorthwest and began researching employment data for the Blue economy. On Wednesday, I organized all the Blue economy employment data into a folder to be used in future discussions and analysis. I also used the Oregon employment 2020-2030 projection data from the Oregon Employment Department and then researched Lincoln County’s average percentage of the state employment per industry to determine the projections of employment increases in certain industries specifically in Lincoln County.
I then began working on International Economic Development Week planning to be ready to discuss in the board meeting. I reviewed the Toolkit from the International Economic Development Council and began writing EDALC’s plan for the week based on the toolkit and our capacity. I also created a social media promo graphic for our board members to share during the week. At the end of my week, I continued to prepare for the Economic Development Week discussion and added some developments to our campaign plan. I also created a notes sheet about my questions and research for the Blue Economy analysis and continued looking into Blue economy data and possible strategies for properly evaluating the Blue economy. I also began creating a mail chimp campaign for Economic Development Week to be released the week prior and participated in the board meeting.
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Paul’s Update:
Blue Economy – I continued preliminary planning work on our congressionally-directed-funding blue economy projects. On Thursday morning, I met with Mark Farley over at Hatfield (yowza, I love meeting in that lobby space with a nice latte!) to discuss next steps and a potential leadership team. We also discussed the need (or perhaps not-need) of a stand-alone O2IH entity at this point in time. We did agree that we should probably explore the creation of a 501(c)(3) to serve as a receiving fiscal agent of future grants.
Regional ED Practitioners – We had our monthly meeting of economic development practitioners (and support team) in the CWEDD region. I was able to give an update on our upcoming blue economy work. In our next meeting, we’ll be getting an update from the Portland-based mass timber project – the only EDA Build Back Better phase 1 awardee in Oregon.
Newport Chamber Economic Summit – I met with Jeanette and Judy at the Newport Chamber to dial in the upcoming economic summit. Before the meeting, we all independently came to the same conclusion that doing it in early May is too soon and it was rescheduled for Thursday, October 20th (to avoid much of the tourism season) – we also nailed down a number of the panels for the event. Looks like it’ll be a solid event and I’m so glad there will be time to plan it properly.
Newport Vision/Ford Family Foundation – I met with Leslie Palotas this week, and we’ll be following up with a senior staff meeting at the City fo Newport in the coming weeks. We’re still continuing to explore the possibility of entering the larger county region on Ford’s community website program, as well as brining our custom WordPress plugin into the mix. We also discussed the logistics of Leslie becoming a grant-funded EDALC employee, which both Newport and Ford are in favor of (the grant funds already rest with Newport). We also realized that our custom plug-in might also be a perfect tool for some of our blue economy project deliverables – namely a web portal of active blue sector projects along the coast.
Upcoming – A couple of things are coming up next week… On Monday, I’ll be presenting an EDALC update to the Lincoln City city council. On Tuesday, I’ll be joining a number of folks to help Dave Price introduce the SBDC’s state director to local stakeholders. On Thursday evening, I’ll be part of a Blue Economy panel at the Lincoln City Cultural Center, hosted by the RAIN Blue Catalyst, Connor Nolan.
As a reminder – your Board of Directors resource page is here:
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 🙂