Greetings and welcome to Wednesday! And welcome to Thanksgiving Eve!

 

On Monday at 5pm, we shut down the grant application portal. Nearly 30 grant applications (easily the most ever!) requesting over $500K in funds! The team is currently assembling the grant packets, building the scoring sheet and working to validate the eligibility of the applications (with county staff). We also ran headfirst into the “auto censor” feature of the county’s CivicPlus-powered website and a certain Oregon State Senator’s first name. Stacie saved the day on that one!

 

Yesterday, the team met at Allred for cocktail hour and to toast how thankful we are to be working together as a team (and for an amazing Board of Directors). It’s been a long year these past few weeks, so it was rejuvenating to spread some cheer together.

 

Here’s our slightly-shorter weekly team update:

 

    • Partner Support/Community Support 
      • Georgia Pacific – Paul and Marshall attended the first meeting of the newly revived Community Advisory Group at the GP admin offices. The group is an effort to better connect with the larger community. Attendees reviewed by-laws and charter and discussed what local project should be funded with penalty dollars from a 2022 DEQ violation.
      • City of Newport – The City of Newport has hired one of the finalists for the Economic Mobility Program Manager position, who will be starting in early January. The new hire (a very strong candidate), Paul and Nina Vetter will be travelling to El Paso in mid-December for in-depth economic mobility training.
      • CWEDD – Sarah filmed the final CWEDD video interview with Paul on Tuesday and began editing the video.
  • Strengthening Rural Families – Sarah attended a board work session for Strengthening Rural Families’ annual fundraising campaign.
      • University of Oregon School of Journalism – Paul and Sarah met with Andrew DiVigal of the OU School of Journalism. His class will be focusing on community media, storytelling and truth in Lincoln County in the winter semester.
  • Blue Economy/O2IH
      • Stacie published the Seafood Butchery Program story to the O2IH website.
  • Entrepreneurship
      • Cascades West Innovation Hub – The Innovation Hub hired Dr. Mary Phillips as the Hub’s Partnership Manager, starting on December 1. Mary previously served as the Director for Research Development for OSU as well as working on IP licensing for both OSU and OHSU.
      • Rural Opportunity Initiative – Paul and Stacie met with Brian Plinski (Business Oregon’s head of the ROI program) to discuss our work plan and budget modifications (EDALC was awarded $140K rather than the requested $150K – a very workable cutback). The contracts should be put together over the coming weeks. All told, 18 ROI grants were awarded across the state this biennium.
  • Core Economic Development Services
  • Community and Economic Development Grant Program – There were a few last minute issues + panicked calls/emails but all applicants have received a confirmation email. Paul, Sarah, and Stacie are working on verifying/compiling the applications and updating the scoresheet. The goal is to get the applications and scoresheet to board members by end of day Friday December 5th with the intention of meeting to review and finalize recommendations in January.
  • Community Connecting
      • Bigger CC update next week – Leslie missed the assignment of a Wednesday weekly update, so she’ll make next week’s update cover two weeks!
  • Organizational Management
  • Marketing & Communication – Stacie created and scheduled posts for Thanksgiving and Small Business Saturday.
  • Admin
  • Strategic Planning – Paul received an updated plan from Kaety Jacobson today on our strategic planning process, which will kick off in early 2026.

 

Reminder: there will be NO December Board of Directors meeting. We’ll meet (virtually) in January for grant reporting. Paul was going to send out the date choices this week, but thought it’d be better to wait until after Thanksgiving.

 

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 Thanksgiving weekend!

 

Cheers,

 

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