Greetings and welcome to Friday! While it still may be damp out there, it’s nothing like yesterday’s crazy atmospheric river! Hopefully, most of us have power and other services restored (Leslie is still without Internet in Seal Rock)!

 

Next week is a short week – the team will be working on Monday and Tuesday (we’ll shoot out a short update on Tuesday). EDALC offices will be closed from Christmas Eve through the New Year – we’ll be back at it on Monday January 5th. The team has worked hard and a nice end-of-year break is well-deserved. Our holiday newsletter will go out next week.

 

Sarah has been on vacation in Arizona this week, so the update is a little shorter than usual. Here’s our weekly team update:

 

    • Partner Support/Community Support 
      • City of Newport – Paul travelled with Nina Vetter and Allyson West (the City’s new Economic Mobility Manager) to El Paso last week for the ICMA’s Economic Mobility and Opportunity convening (the whole nationwide program is funded by the Gates Foundation). The event featured instructional sessions and numerous working group opportunities for the communities. In the new year, Allyson will be working at the EDALC offices one day a week and the rest of the week at City Hall. Paul also reports that the crew enjoyed lunch at Taconeta, a James Beard nominee in 2024 – and that the tacos were astounding (Paul: four stars – would recommend!)
  • Entrepreneurship
      • Cascades West Innovation Hub – Paul and Stacie worked on planning, EventBrite registration, and panelist invites for our 1/27/26 event, Fueling Growth: How Lincoln County Service Providers Can Support Innovation-Based Businesses, at the OCCC Newport campus. The audience for the event is economic support organizations in Lincoln County. Greg Price will be joining the event panel to talk about the SBDC as well as alternative paths to capital access. Stacie is getting a handle on the branding/social media/event guides created for the hub to ensure all of our public-facing work is in alignment. Paul met with Innovation Hub Partnership Manager Mary Phillips on Wednesday at Hatfield.
      • EDA Disaster Supplemental – Paul met with Rural Prosperity Partners to talk through the latest draft of the narrative. Paul also received a copy of a letter of commitment from The Ford Family Foundation for matching funds of $50,000. The $300,000 grant will be submitted in early January.
      • Rural Opportunity Initiative – Paul received and signed the ROI contract from Business Oregon yesterday afternoon. The initial payment for the grant should come in sometime in January.
  • Broadband
      • Broadband Action Team – Paul attended Thursday’s BAT meeting. Oregon should hear by 12/22 from the NTIA if the state’s BEAD applications are approved for federal funding. Some upcoming FCC regulation changes will allow for bigger bandwidth pipelines to cell towers for fixed wireless services. USDA ReConnect 6 should be opening up early in the new year, but most likely with no grant options – only low interest loans, and a lesser funding pool. The Oregon Broadband Office is one of the state agencies asked to trim their budget – we’ll know more about what that looks like in February during the short session.
  • Core Economic Development Services
  • 2026 Lincoln County Economic Summit (3/12/26) – Paul put the finishing touches on the primary 2026 Summit graphic. Stacie created a save the date for the holiday newsletter, and updated the project plan.
  • Community Connecting
  • Expanding the Community Connector’s Network of Knowledge, Aligned Organizations, and Resources for the Year Ahead – One of the most reaffirming parts of Leslie’s Community Connector work is finding aligned individuals, concepts, networks, and organizations throughout the nation and world to connect with and learn from. In the continued pursuit of future funding and work, Leslie has been diving into the array of aligned efforts to see how they can strengthen and support future CC efforts. Some of her recent discoveries include:
  • Nicky Case’s Public Domain Resources
  • This Evolution of Trust Game is an incredibly cute and entertaining activity that weaves game theory with underlying concepts of trust building, misunderstandings, communication, and human behaviors that can both accelerate and stagnate community engagement and decision-making. If you have 30ish minutes to test your knowledge of what type of personalities and decision makers can lead to sustained collaboration (with multiple variables to adjust throughout the activity), Leslie can’t recommend this activity enough. For her holiday gaming enjoyment, Leslie is also excited to dig through Nicky’s entire site with games, comics, and understanding-building tools galore…
  • Organizational Management
  • Marketing & Communication
        • Stacie finished the holiday newsletter. She also managed social media including  sharing the wide range of Lincoln county activities to FB and IG stories today.
  • Professional Development
  • Leadership Lincoln – Stacie attended Leadership Lincoln at the Embarcadero on Wednesday where she enjoyed a presentation on the Port of Newport, and learned more about state and local governments from some of our local elected officials as well as Newport City Manager extraordinaire Nina Vetter. She scheduled a 12/28 Toledo park cleanup with her community project group, and will also be working with three other LL participants to develop her/their Conflict Management skills with a presentation planned for the February 18th class. Jalene Case has also provided a link for Leslie to complete the DISC assessment that Sarah, Paul, and Stacie have taken as part of LL so that the full team can avail themselves of the insights/information/opportunities made possible by this part of the program.
  • Nonprofit Small Business Management – Paul attended the penultimate SBM for Nonprofits this week. This month’s topic focused on developing a marketing plan. EDALC is in pretty good shape on that front, but Paul picked up some good tidbits.

 

Just a reminder – we will have our grant review meeting (via Zoom) on Thursday, January 8th at 3:30pm. Please have your scoresheets to Paul by Tuesday, January 6th.

 

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)