Greetings and welcome to Friday and welcome to our last update of 2023! With the OCCC buildings being closed next week, Sarah and I will be working remotely for the shortened week. Look for us to to be back at it with weekly updated starting January 5th.
First, some wonderful “holiday presents” to share as we go into the year-end celebrations:
-Yesterday, Sarah and Leslie and I gathered at the Wilds (formerly Wolf Tree) for a few cups of holiday cheer and to toast a year well-fought and rich with meaningful results. The Wilds isn’t quite fully operational, but they unlocked the doors for us (while they were literally still painting!) and shared with us some sample smoked BBQ goodies. What a great and amazing team we have!!
-This week saw the closing of the 2023-24 Community and Economic Development Grant Program application period. This year we had 18 applications!! Of those 18, five were Impact grant applications!! Woo hoo! We’ll pull all the applications and supporting documents together, review and get those out to the board next week.
-And our final year-end gift: last night, I received this from Business Oregon:
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I am pleased to provide advance notification that your grant application for The Rural Opportunity Initiative (ROI) program to Business Oregon has been recommended for funding. Congratulations!
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The official press release came out late this morning, so now it’s public news. Woo hoo!
Here’s our staff update for the week:
Blue Economy::
I read the new lease agreement for the Central Coast Food Web and Yaquina Lab location and attended the executive committee meeting Wednesday Morning. – Sarah
Broadband::
On Tuesday, I met with a team from Solarity as they are preparing to craft an Oregon Broadband Office Capital Improvement Projects infrastructure grant for Pioneer Cooperative that will provide additional fiber connectivity to both Lincoln and Benton counties. We spent the time talking through potential ways to tally in-kind support from local stakeholders from October 23 through March 24. Thursday was also our regional Broadband Action Team meeting – most of the time was spent discussing the BTAP program, which will open up on January 2nd and the new requirement to obtain a (no cost) “fabric data license” for any entities that look to apply for BEAD funding. – Paul
Communication/Marketing::
This week the holiday Mailchimp newsletter was sent out and I posted on the EDALC Facebook page about an upcoming SBDC course and closing the EDALC office for the holidays. – Sarah
Community and Economic Development Grant Program::
The application deadline for the grant program was on Monday, we had a few applicants that required some additional hand holding, however, we received 13 standard applications and 5 impact grant applications all within the deadline! I sent each of them a confirmation email that we received their application as they came in. – Sarah
Entrepreneurship::
I created a brainstorm list of local businesses and entrepreneurs that I will be reaching out to for videos for the Youth Entrepreneurship Program and discussed some video themes and questions with Kelliane at the SBDC. If you are interested or have suggestions for local business owners that have a good story, insights for those interested in starting a business, and are compelling and comfortable talking in front of a camera – please reach out and send their contact information to me! – Sarah
Organizational Management::
Yesterday, I spent the day getting our physical offices (and my desk!) all spiffy for the New Year and setting up my whiteboard with our key strategic priority areas for 2024, so we can hit the ground running at the first of the year. Open AI also opened up their business-level services again for enrollment (they were at capacity and locked down for a few months), so I signed EDALC up to the tool suite, which includes the professional-level ChatGPT plus a whole host of other tools that will help add capacity to the work of our small team going forward. – Paul
Project Work::
This week I added the new Oregon Coast SBDC winter business courses to our opportunities for entrepreneurs slider on the EDALC website. I also continued to work on the DEQ Source Water workshop videos, the main thing that is taking up my time is correcting and making sure all the captions are accurate (AI can only go so far). In addition, I updated Oregon Prospector listings and put our economic summit save the date on the EDALC website. – Sarah
Supporting and Connecting with Partners::
CW COG/CWEDD – On Monday, I travelled to Albany to participate in the third attempt at finalist interviews for the COG’s Community and Economic Development Director position (who also serves as the Executive Director of the Economic Development District). The third time looks to be a charm, and all three panels selected the same highly-qualified finalist. It looks like we’ll have a strong, experienced and knowledgable partner to collaborate with going forward. – Paul
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 holiday weekend! And have a joyous and safe New Year’s celebration. We’ll see you all in 2024!!
Cheers,
-Paul 🙂