Not much of an update this week – it is that wonderful and weird dead zone between the Christmas holiday and New Years.
Sarah and her family are off in Italy right now. Leslie and I are holding down the fort remotely, though I am taking tomorrow and Friday off. We’ll be back at it on Tuesday, January 3rd.
I’m working out of the Waldport office today, getting things buttoned down and tidied up for the new year.
We did have a Blue Sector study advisory meeting yesterday, where we reviewed the first draft report that came in (lots of comments and good suggestions) and discussed the matrix for evaluating and “scoring” potential Blue Economy opportunities in Oregon. It’s clear that the firm doing the report is solid on the research side, but a little naive on the economic development side, since they totally omitted the “markets” when evaluating new opportunities, but I think we got them back on the right path!
I also has some conversations with Marcus Hinz of OCVA late last week and this week – it seems like they’d like to to a “Lincoln County Economic Report” style research project for the whole coast, also working with TRG (who will be updating our local report). Both Dave Price and I weighed in – it sounds like a great idea in search of funding, but not nearly as deep a dive as we’re planning to do locally.
Leslie has put together a fascinating draft of her “Top Six Replicable and Scaleable Rural Community Building Lessons” – truly insightful lessons and ways to think about future collaborative work – check it out here:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/103oZV4sa0pGmM7_1kIKi8EkIk3k0UGG9dDV_l5ZvWsc/edit?usp=sharing
Remember, there will be NO EDALC BoD meeting in January, as per past tradition. Our February meeting will be on Thursday, February 2nd and it will be our grant review meeting.
Thanks for ALL that you are doing out there! Please reach out to me if you need anything at all. Have a wonderful, safe and champagne-filled New Years celebration! We’ll see you all in 2023!
Cheers,
-Paul 