Greetings and welcome to 2026! Even though we’re just getting started, in many ways, it does feel like it’s already been a long year so far!

 

Thanks to all of the Directors who attended our annual grant review meeting yesterday afternoon. Also (and as always), thanks so much for the time, focus and careful consideration directed to all of our applications! This year we had 28 applications – by far a record for this program. Paul will send out a cleaned up scoresheet next week for a final review before Paul presents the recommendations to the Board of Commissioners.

 

Here’s our weekly team update:

 

    • Partner Support/Community Support 
  • CCFW – Sarah met with the planning team of the Blue Line event happening at CCFW next month.
  • City of Newport – Allyson West, Newport’s Economic Mobility Program Manager, joined us in the office on Tuesday. Paul met with her in the morning to talk through priority projects and approaches. We took some time Tuesday afternoon to familiarize ourselves with her work and brainstorm some potential starting points for the discovery phase of her role. She’ll be joining us on Tuesdays for the foreseeable future as she begins economic mobility program discovery/planning.
  • Entrepreneurship
  • Cascades West Innovation Hub – Stacie sent an eventbrite campaign to those who hadn’t yet opened their December invite to the 1/27/26 event and created event graphics + social media posts for LI, IG, and FB. Paul met with the CWIH regional leads this afternoon to talk through grant reporting, stakeholder meeting frequency and newsletter approaches and content.
      • EDA Disaster Supplemental grant – Paul and Rachael (from Rural Prosperity Partners) met with Wes Cochran from the EDA to discuss our upcoming Disaster Supplemental $300K grant application (target submission in two weeks).
  • Core Economic Development Services
  • 2026 Lincoln County Economic Summit (3/12/26) The team worked on registration setup, event graphics, the sponsorship package, keynote speaker outreach, potential panelists, and other planning tasks. We are on track to open registration and begin marketing the summit next week.
  • Community & Economic Development Grant Program – Paul aggregated all of the scores into the master scoresheet and the EDALC Directors met on Thursday to discuss scores and come to a consensus on awardees and amounts for the Standard and Impact grants.
  • Lincoln County Economic Report Update – Sarah looked back at the final draft of the Lincoln County economic report and began looking back into debt to income ratios. Paul and Sarah are meeting with Shannon and Hans from TRG to discuss the final report and marketing plan next week.
  • Oregon Prospector – Sarah updated Oregon Prospector listings and added new ones.
  • Community Connecting
  • EDALC Lincoln County Economic Summit Sponsorship Level Package R&D – At an EDALC team meeting this week, Leslie presented and fine-tuned concepts to attract and benefit 2026 Lincoln County Economic Summit Sponsors. Stacie will be working her graphic design magic on the materials before Paul sends them out to potential event sponsors. Email paul@businesslincolncounty.com if your organization would like to see the sponsorship packages and benefits from supporting EDALC’s most popular annual event!
  • Organizational Management
  • Marketing & Communication – Stacie began working on the quarterly newsletter and caught up on social media management tasks.

 

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 Holiday Season!!

 

Cheers,

 

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