Greetings and welcome to Friday and to the first day of Spring! 

 

Next week is Spring Break. We hope some of you have some escape plans. Paul will join Susan (for the first time in quite a few years) on her annual pilgrimage to visit her Mother in rural Illinois and her Father in Indianapolis (Paul here – rule number one: “No talking politics with the parents!”).

 

Just a quick look ahead – based on our last Board of Directors meeting, we’ll have our April meeting via Zoom and not in person. Staff will come to the Board with a potential in-person/event meeting schedule soon (hopefully in April!).

 

Here’s our weekly team update:

 

    • Partner Support/Community Support 
      • City of Toledo – EDALC received word this week that the City of Toledo will step up with funding for the August Art, Oysters & Brews festival (run in partnership with EDALC) while the city explores longer-term options for the ART Toledo initiative.
  • CCFW – Sarah attended the executive committee meeting and full board meeting for Central Coast Food Web.
      • CWCOG Loan Review – Paul reviewed and recommended a business loan this week as part of the Loan Review Subcommittee of the Council of Governments.
      • CWEDD – Paul chaired the quarterly Board meeting of the Cascades West Economic Development District from the Lane Council of Governments office in Eugene this Thursday. Paul and Cottage Grove city councilor Greg Ervin were re-elected as Chair and Vice Chair. Also our own Gregory Price will be joining the CWEDD board (a few more COG and CWEDD official votes are needed to make it official) as part of an effort to get more professionals who actually work with our regional business community on the Board (a great move!).
      • Leadership Lincoln – Paul delivered a shortened version of his “Creativity Boot Camp” program on functional creativity and problem solving to the Leadership Lincoln cohort on Wednesday morning. He first delivered the long version of this program (6+ hours!) at the Computer Game Developers’ Conference in 1999.
  • Strengthening Rural Families – Sarah attended a Strengthening Rural Families board meeting and celebration dinner for the organization’s 20th anniversary.
    • Entrepreneurship
      • Cascades West Innovation Hub – On Wednesday night, Paul had a working dinner with Matt Sayre and Caitlin Vargas of CEDO (https://www.collaborativeedo.org/)  in Eugene – they are the Lane County Regional Lead for the Innovation Hub. Paul also attended (and helped with registration check-in) a CWIH event held at the Knife River training center (an amazing facility, if you haven’t seen it) in Albany. The event focused on the success of Valliscor (can you guess the anagram?), a chemical manufacturing company building a 13 acre campus in Albany (they create custom chemicals for the pharmaceutical and semiconductor industries). The event featured their “origin story” plus a fascinating panel of all of the organizations that were instrumental in their success.
    • Core Economic Development Services
  • Lincoln County Economic Report – Paul and Sarah had a meeting with Quinton from the Lincoln Chronicle about the Lincoln County Economic Report update.
  • Lincoln County Economic Summit – Sarah worked on summit thank you cards and sent out a post event thank you email to attendees. Stacie posted an event follow up/gratitude post to social media, completed the survey raffle today, and performed a registration analysis that will support our Cascades West Innovation Hub deliverables. Incentivizing survey participation resulted in a   164% increase in responses in the week following the event and we’re going to leave the survey open for at least another week.
      • Oregon Prospector – Sarah updated listings on Oregon Prospector and added new ones.
    • Community Connecting
  • Community Connector Webpage Updating – Leslie and her new power-teammate, Claude, have been plugging away on the long-overdue task of compiling and updating materials for EDALC’s CC Webpage. Leslie aims to have this updated as soon as possible, before her week of presentations and networking in Bend (NADO and R2R conferences). Leslie’s been most excited to create the “menu” of Community Connector services – seven collaboratively planned and implemented efforts that have been piloted, improved with community feedback, and replicated to show sustained or improved participation. 
  • Marketing & Communication Stacie managed EDALC social media and began planning the Spring 2026 newsletter. She also added new Director bios and photos to the website.
  • Admin
      • Stacie attended Leadership Lincoln and the SBDC’s User Experience, Digital Marketing, and Accessibility class.

 

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)