Greetings and welcome to Friday! It’s been an awesome sunny (though at times chilly) week, and the weekend looks much the same. SO good to see those stars out at night!

 

In just over a week and a half, EDALC will be running a Cascades West Innovation Hub event at the Newport OCCC campus entitled: Fueling Growth. The primary audience are professionals and organizations that serve Lincoln County businesses – to better educate them on the unique need of high-growth innovation businesses and how the Hub can help support their growth. 

 

Directors – even if you don’t directly work with businesses, it will still be an interesting event to learn more about the statewide Innovation Hub efforts and the unique challenges faced by traded-sector innovative businesses – please join us! Also, Sarah will be making breakfast charcuterie! Here’s a link to the free registration:

 

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/fueling-growth-how-lincoln-county-service-providers-can-support-innovation-tickets-1977992454678?aff=oddtdtcreator

 

Here’s our weekly team update:

 

    • Partner Support/Community Support
      • CCFW – Sarah led the CCFW Winter board meeting and met with Kaety Jacobson and Jim King to discuss CCFW’s new strategic plan.
      • Economic Development Practitioners – Allyson, Leslie, Paul and Stacie trekked to Albany for the quarterly Economic Development Practitioners lunch meeting, organized by the COG. It was the best turnout in years with 12 economic developers in attendance – it’s a great way to connect, share best practices (and war stories) and support each other throughout the region.
  • OCWCOG – Sarah was officially voted into the OCWCOG Loan Program Advisory Committee on Thursday.
  • Blue Economy/O2IH
      • Challenger Biosciences – Paul and Mark Farley met on Monday with Don from Challenger Biosciences to get caught up on the latest developments in several related biomanufacturing efforts. They’ll come back together in a few weeks to develop a Q126 action plan.
  • Economic Mobility
      • Meeting – Paul met with Nina and Allyson at Newport City Hall on Monday to talk through project vision, workplan and the Co-Design process (a formalized process to get deep constituent involvement as part of a large project planning process) – something Allyson will be leading in the coming months.
  • Entrepreneurship
      • Cascades West Innovation Hub – The team worked this week to continue planning the January 27th event and continuing to spread the word. Stacie and Paul also worked to put together and submit the first required report for our work with the Hub.
      • EDA Disaster Supplemental – Paul met with the grant writer at Rural Prosperity Partners to review the budget for our upcoming $300K grant submission (target: submission in two weeks).
      • Rural Opportunity Initiative – EDALC received the first ROI contract payment via ACH this week. The official ROI kick-off meeting will be February 6th.
  • Core Economic Development Services
  • Economic Summit – Sarah worked on summit speaker invites and coordination, press release, supplies list and organizing the agenda. Sarah and Stacie worked on getting the Eventbrite live, which you can view here: tinyurl.com/2026LCSummit. We also locked in Georgia Pacific as the platinum sponsor for the event, and Paul wrapped up his quest to lock in a keynote speaker that will inform and amaze. Stacie put the final touches on the sponsor solicitation packet.
      • Lincoln County Economic Report Update – Paul and Sarah met with Shannon and Hans of The Research Group to walk through the FINAL version of the report (after over four and a half years, it’s awesome to see this project coming to a close!). Sarah will be putting together a marketing plan to get the word out, and the team will be building a dedicated web page on our website to share the report and key insights.
  • Community Connecting
  • Regards To Rural “Power of Coalitions” Session Planning with Rural Development Initiatives (RDI) – This week’s invitation for Leslie to join this conference session’s design and presentation team is another positive outcome of her joining last year’s Turn Up Your Voice Cohort. The Ford Family Foundation will be covering Leslie’s conference and lodging fees for the April 16-17 event. At their first meeting this week, RDI’s Kendra Schaffer and Leslie started talking concepts and co-presenters and are working on individual action items before re-convening with a larger design team. 
  • Organizational Management
  • Marketing & Communication
      • Stacie created and scheduled posts for MLK day.

 

That’s it for this week – thanks for ALL that you are doing out there. Keep us posted if you have anything you want us to share – we love hearing from you! Have a wonderful weekend!

 

Cheers,

 

-The EDALC Team (Paul, Sarah, Leslie and Stacie)