Greetings and welcome to a sunny and warm Friday and what looks to be a gorgeous weekend!

 

A bit shorter update this week – Stacie has been out, attending the League of Oregon Cities conference in Pendleton with her husband Andrew. Next week, we’ll have the full band back together!

 

Save the date: the date of the 2026 joint EDALC/YBEF annual meeting has been set. Our annual meeting and fun-times shindig will be on Wednesday, June 24th from 5:30-7:30pm at Myril. Stick it on your calendars, and more information will be coming soon.

 

Here’s our weekly team update:

 

    • Partner Support/Community Support 
  • Art, Oysters & Brews – Stacie worked on the budget, created/posted a save the date, and shared the caption and graphic with partners. Sarah sent out the AOB vendor recruitment mailchimp email.
  • CCFW – Sarah prepped for and ran the CCFW board meeting on Tuesday.
  • City of Newport/Lincoln City – Sarah continued working on the City of Lincoln City and City of Newport reports EDALC puts together to demonstrate our work when asking those cities for funding. Leslie updated her section to reflect her community connecting work in each city. 
      • Northwest Oregon Works – Marshall and Paul both gave updates (on the OCCC and EDALC) at the quarterly NOW board meeting, held this morning at OCCC’s central campus.
  • Blue Economy/O2IH
      • Innovation – Based on an abbreviated proposal by Mango Materials for a demonstration project (that Challenger Biosciences, Mark Farley and EDALC helped to craft), they have been invited to submit a funding proposal for the nitrogen removal project to Schmidt Marine Technology Partners.
  • Entrepreneurship
  • EDA Disaster Supplemental – After jumping through many hoops, we will finally be submitting our EDA grant application next week.
  • KlamathIDEA – Paul travelled to Klamath Falls to present at Klamath IDEA’s speaker series (think TEDx talk – a well attended event series that they’ve been running for over six years). While in Klamath Falls, Paul met with the state’s SBDC assistant director, Klamath Falls mayor, their Innovation Hub director (who is also a software innovator) and an economics professor from Oregon Tech.
  • YEP – Sarah continued planning the YEP event and explored options for organizing this year’s crowd-favorite pitch voting.
  • Broadband
      • Broadband Action Team – In this month’s BAT meeting, facilitator Joe Franell delivered a presentation on the latest projections on a Cascadia subduction event. That presentation was a precursor and context-builder for next month’s presentation on the telecommunications ramifications of a Cascadia event.
  • Core Economic Development Services
  • Economic Vitality Report Card – Sarah began updating the Economic Vitality Report card.
  • Oregon Prospector – Sarah did another big update and clean up to the Oregon Prospector listings and tracking spreadsheet, this time with all the cities besides Newport and Lincoln City as well as the unincorporated areas.
  • Community Connecting
  • Regards to Rural (R2R) “Power in Connections” Session – Last Thursday’s interactive breakout session gathered about 90 attendees and received incredible feedback (including this unsolicited email from Willamette Partners’ Executive Director – “the best conference breakout I’ve ever been to”). Stacie Keating, Lisa Norton, and Willow Ryon joined from our region. Five partners from RCBC organizations and dozens of collaborators, consultants, and community leaders from across the Pacific Northwest joined and enthusiastically participated, making the packed room the most engaged and positively charged Leslie experienced the entire week. Many rounds of silent applause (aka jazz hands), laughter, and grins were shared. Click here to see Leslie’s script, session pictures, and here to learn more about the session and co-presenters. This collaborative presentation power-team was so excited about the feedback and outcome of this session that they’ll be meeting next week to de-brief and plan how to replicate it for new audiences in the future. Also at this conference, Leslie met and reconnected with many RCBC and Economic Development professionals from across the Pacific Northwest – she’s still digesting all she learned and discussed.
  • Organizational Management
  • Marketing & Communication – Stacie updated the media tracker.

 

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)