Good afternoon and welcome to Friday! Looks like a damp, cool and foggy weekend – a perfect time to whip up that first batch of Fall chili!

 

Paul, Sarah and Gregory attended The Ford Family Foundation’s GRO Gathering last Tuesday through Thursday in Roseburg (at TFFF’s quite swanky HQ). This is the first GRO event in the last three years and the first one that included three ROI communities. In all, six communities were invited, with three participants from each.

 

The key highlight of the event was Andy Stoll – who attended the whole event and also facilitated several sessions. He’s one of (if not THE) leading national thought leaders in entrepreneurial ecosystem development. He served as the entrepreneurial program officer at the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, literally helping to write that national playbook on the work. He was the founding Executive Director (and is now the “Senior Fellow”) at the national ESHIP Alliance (https://www.eship.org). What an amazing and inspirational speaker who was all about “here’s how we DO this work.” Lots to unpack from that event!

 

Here’s our weekly team update:

 

    • Partner Support/Community Support 
      • Central Coast Food Web – Sarah attended a CCFW executive committee meeting on Monday.
  • Economic Mobility
  • AI for Businesses Training in Spanish – On Tuesday, Victor Villegas’ “Inteligencia Artificial para Crecimiento de Pequeños Negocios” free training filled the Hatfield Library conference room with 30 folks representing 20 businesses, including 10 contractor businesses. The trust-built groundwork that the Juntos en Colaboracion (JeC) network has built for years showed. Victor’s been in JeC since 2020 as well and he often raves about Lincoln County leading the way for the state in Latine community networking, support, and programming. It was awesome this course brought the community to him in person. See the data and feedback Allyson compiled here. 
      • Co-Design Team Meeting 3 – Leslie spent a lot of this week meeting with Allyson and Gia to plan and prepare materials for Thursday night’s third Co-Design Meeting, where the group assessed the nine themes that have been elevated after the first two rounds of community interviews. The final sprint includes asking potential beneficiaries of an experiential career development pilot program to rank the themes’ importance to their interest and ability to participate in a program, and also gathers existing community assets that could help the planning, implementation, or outreach for the Co-Design recommendations to the City of Newport. 
  • Entrepreneurship
      • GRO Gathering prep work – Sarah put together a document to prepare the team for the kick-off storytelling activity on Wednesday. Paul and Sarah read through the just-released “Growing From Within: How Rural Communities Build Entrepreneurial Ecosystems” study.
      • GRO homework – Paul put together an initial draft of an updated Lincoln County Entrepreneurial Ecosystem map and sent it out to the team and Gregory – great feedback already received. Paul will refine the draft so that it can be shared with the Board in November.
  • Youth Entrepreneurship Program – Sarah started editing the first YEP founder video.
      • Fail Fest 11/12 @ Primaltones – Stacie continued trying to recruit a couple more speakers. She went to Yachats on Thursday to try to connect with some prospects, and concluded that she doesn’t spend enough time in Yachats. She also designed the event poster, worked on the press release, and began drafting social media content in preparation for the marketing push starting next week.
      • OEN 10/14/26 PubTalk @ Primaltones – Stacie connected with SBDC about potential needing another entrepreneur to pitch and sent a biz blurb request to the Newport Chamber of Commerce.
  • Cascades West Innovation Hub – Stacie began working on the quarterly report due 10/15/26.
  • Community Connecting
  • Oregon Humanities Community Conversation Facilitator – Leslie’s in the Cohort! – Last weekend, Leslie received the news that she was selected to join the 2027 cohort! As shared in the congratulations email from Oregon Humanities: “During this call, we received 65 applications proposing 110 conversation topics. 32 applicants were selected for an interview, and of those, 23 were invited into this training cohort.” The next stage begins with a Zoom meeting next Friday, then Leslie will high tail it from presenting at the Resilience Summit in Sunriver the following Friday to the two day in-person training in Portland. She is SO excited that this includes another statewide cohort with a workshopping process – Leslie’s a sucker for growing her professional networks through shared learning experiences and feedback!
  • Organizational Management
  • Marketing & Communication – Stacie finalized the quarterly newsletter pending Paul’s review and writing of his letter. She also managed social media, including the creation of a new “Economic Development in Progress” post.
  • Project Work – Stacie and Paul reviewed the proposal and budget for another year of TALC partnership with CTSI before Leslie sent it to the CTSI team. Stacie attended the The Oregon DEQ Food Waste Infrastructure Program (FWIP) Notice of Funding Opportunity Pre-Bid Conference for the Large-Scale Grant Opportunity to learn more about its potential to fund local projects.
  • Admin – Stacie completed the 10/1/26 BoD meeting minutes.

 

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)