Greetings and welcome to another damp Friday (didn’t I just say that last week?). Looks like a wet weekend – perhaps a perfect opportunity to “convince” our pooch Stella to do her business with a touch more alacrity!
Here’s our update for the week –
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Suzan’s week:
* Daily/weekly routine tasks
* Pay bills in bill pay
* Approve & update bills & deposit in QBO
* Phone staff meetings
* Re-subscribe to News-Times
* Reconcile db w/MailChimp email lists
* Update db
* Research, prep for newsletter
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Paul’s week:
Strategic Overview – I had a few more critical eyes look over our strategic overview and I made some additional edits based on some solid feedback – I’m stuck on the verbiage for one headline, but it’ll come to me today or over the weekend and then we can put this draft to bed and get to using it as a tool moving forward.
DEI Plan – One of our strategic goals is “Pursue a more diverse, resilient and equitable local economy” – something that is front-of-mind in a lot of organizations these days, growing out of some very challenging events in 2020. One of the nice offshoots of the DEI training I completed was getting assigned an accountability partner – we will be able to help each other pull together DEI action plans to utilize in our workplaces. I had my first call this morning and have a draft plan (plus some initial action steps) that I shared for feedback.
Enterprise Zone – I took the formal step to identify our intent to re-designate our Enterprise Zone with the state this week (done through Business Oregon). I also attended a webinar yesterday for the twelve zones that are looking to re-designate this year – to go over the process and order of operations (which meshed pretty well with what I was anticipating). Next week will be the required consultation call with the State and then we’ll put together our plan for our zone process.
Toledo ART – I spent some time this week working with Rachael Wallace at the Toledo High School to help her understand the WordPress web technology so she can teach her students the nitty gritty. Next week, I’ll be putting together a press release on the artist application process for the phantom galleries. It also looks like there will be a story in the News Guard.
CW-COGs – This week, I had a “meet and greet” call with Anne Whittington, a new addition to our local COGs team (she’s coming to the COG after about 15 years of work with the SBDC). In addition to getting to know each other, she informed me of some grant monies coming down the pike for supporting EDO work – and there might be a great fit to help us secure some professional-grade BRE tracking software.
Blue Economy – I wrote and submitted two letters in support of grant applications for the Port of Newport. One for a planning grant to repair Port Dock 7 and the other to develop a marketing plan for the International Terminal.
Leadership Lincoln Video Project – This month’s Leadership Lincoln class was a bit of a challenge, since a car plowed into a power pole and took out nearly all the power for south Lincoln City (we were at the OCCC campus). I had to do my SBDC CVID call in a dark room running off of a cell-phone hotspot! But most clouds have silver linings – I secured for EDALC at DJI stabilization gimbal (a budgeted expense) plus a quality lapel mic, allowing us to have a mobile video studio for some future video production work. Since we had a partial blackout, we were able to take the time to begin shooting some video and voice overs for our “Reasons to Cheer About Lincoln County” video series – the first of which will be focused on Rogue’s pivot to create hand sanitizer early in the COVID crisis.
Lincoln County Living Wage – This was shared with my by Leslie Palotas over at Newport Vision 2040 – a pretty darn detailed set of data points on what a living wage is here in Lincoln County (availability of housing and childcare notwithstanding): https://livingwage.mit.edu/counties/41041 How does this data “feel” to you – accurate?
PPP – This week, we received our PPP funds totaling $31,100. This a bit higher than anticipated, but it looks like the SBA was willing to look at our current payroll burn rate and not just the historical 2019 data.
Next Newsletter – Just a quick reminder that our next newsletter will be going out next week (early Tuesday), so if there’s any info you want me to share or anything you’d like me to highlight, please let me know by EoD on Monday.
Thanks for all that you are doing out there! Please reach out to me if you need anything at all. Don’t forget that Sunday is Valentines Day!
Cheers,
-Paul 🙂