Greetings and welcome to the end of 2021! While we’ve done some great work this year as an organization, we’ve still had to deal with the pandemic in every aspect of our work and personal lives – hopefully 2022 will see some sort of new normal arrive!
Here’s our EDALC update for the week:
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Rural Opportunity Initiative – I reviewed the ROI contract and signed it and yesterday received the fully-executed copy back. First thing next week will be setting up the ACH form (for direct deposit) and sending our organizational W-9 to Business Oregon. The first payment will come in January and the second payment will be in July. I’ll begin scheduling stakeholder meetings starting next week (actually, I’ve got Lincoln City already on my calendar for next Thursday). I’ve also laid out a scheduled of all reporting requirements and milestones, so we stand at the ready to execute some good work over the upcoming year.
O2IH – Mark, Rachael and I met this week to discuss the EDA Good Jobs Challenge – another ARPA-funded grant program. Wes Cochran (our regional EDA rep) *strongly* suggested that we look at submitting an application for at least part of the work we submitted in the Build Back Better application. It looks like we’ve got a pretty strong fit – we still have some questions out to Wes and some other contacts to make, but we should know if we’re going for it by next week – then it’ll be an all-out sprint in January to get it to OSU’s sponsored programs office at the end of the month – I’ll keep you all posted.
County Community and Economic Development Grants – At the County Commissioners’ meeting this Wednesday morning, they formally accepted our board’s recommendation for awards and funding levels for the smaller grants and awarded the large $60,000 grant to the Pioneer application (the one our board and the external reviewer both scored the highest). So excited to see those excellent projects come to fruition. The commissioners thanked the EDALC board for their hard work reviewing these applications. I also reached out to Jason Holland (Oregon Coast Council for the Arts Executive Director) and will be meeting with him a few weeks to learn more about their study on the economic impact of the arts in our region.
2022 Planning – I spent most of my time this week pulling together all the project tracking info, schedules and deadlines into Monday.com, our organizational management tool we’ll be using in 2022. I set up our fundraising CRM system with investor and donation tracking, set up our marketing and communication schedule for the year and also set up a grant management tool. I pulled in all of our contractual obligations from the ROI program, so we can track and hit those milestones as well. I honestly feel VERY positive about where we stand and feel like we’ve got a great head start on an awesome 2022.
As a reminder – your Board of Directors resource page is here:
REMINDER: NO EDALC Board of Directors meeting in January
Thanks for ALL that you are doing out there! Please reach out to me if you need anything at all.
Have a wonderful New Years celebration! We’ll be cooking up some Beef Wellington tonight (with a green peppercorn bourbon sauce) and toasting in the New Year with champagne (at least, when the ball drops in NYC!). See you in 2022!
Cheers,
-Paul 🙂