Greetings and welcome to Friday!

This Tuesday, the whole team descended on the OCCC Newport campus to celebrate our Oregon Coast SBDC’s award as the 2026 Region 10 Center for Excellence and Innovation. We’re SO proud of the whole SBDC team and love collaborating with them!

Paul and Paula chatted this morning – after some hoop jumping, Paula was informed that the Port of Newport would be the feature of an upcoming World’s Greatest episode (part of the Bloomberg TV network). She’ll start working out the content with the producers in the next month or so with filming scheduled for September. Sounds like EDALC might get a cameo!

Thanks to all who could attend Thursday’s slightly earlier Board of Directors meeting, though it does look like the 4pm meet and greet was cancelled before the town hall. GREAT discussions (thanks to the Kelley Nonprofit Consulting team!) on an updated Vision Statement – they will be putting together some questions for Directors who couldn’t make the meeting.

Here’s our weekly team update:

  • Partner Support/Community Support 
      • Art, Oysters & Brews – Stacie created postcards and fliers for vendor recruitment. Sarah sent the vendor registration info to the farmers market manager in Waldport and Newport. 
  • Blue Economy/O2IH
      • Blue Economy Workforce Development Workshop – Paul is attending the day-long workshop at Hatfield today. On one hand, this should be a good convening of organizations that work in this space from Oregon and Washington. On the other hand, it could also be reinventing some wheels that already exist. Paul will report back next week.
  • Economic Mobility
      • August Economic Mobility Conference – Allyson, Nina and Paul locked in their travel plans to head to Washington, DC for a three day economic mobility conference in August featuring all of the ICMA EMO recipient communities nationwide.
      • City of Newport Economic Mobility Planning Meeting – Leslie met with Allyson West and Gia Jensen on Monday to review, schedule, and plan Latine business support programming ideas, phases, and scheduling. They also started plotting out the co-design process for a potential internship/job-shadowing program at the City of Newport – and perhaps partner businesses/organizations interested in getting involved in the early phases of the concept. If you are interested in learning more about co-designing a internship/job shadowing pilot program (and you have connections in multiple sectors and networks) – please email Leslie leslie@businesslincolncounty.com to get on the list of potential partners. 
  • Entrepreneurship
      • Stacie attended the first session of RAIN’s Rural CREATOR program.
      • Youth Entrepreneurship Pitch Competition – Sarah worked on the YEP program, presentation, and met with Kelliane and Lori at Hatfield to do the tech run through. 
  • Core Economic Development Services
      • Business Incentives – Paul attended a Business Oregon Opportunity Zone office hours session to ask a few questions about the upcoming Opportunity Zone 2.0 program rolling out in January. Local organizations (governmental units and EDOs) can nominate/apply (deadline: May 22) to have an eligible census tract declared an OZ. There are five eligible tracts in Lincoln County. Paul also discovered a flaw in BizOR’s application portal that did not allow any entity from Lincoln County to apply. That was fixed late yesterday and EDALC now has in-hand an OZ application – Paul will be reaching out next week on potentially coordinating one or more tract nominations. 
      • Major Employers Report – Sarah began working on the Major Employers report.
      • Oregon Prospector – Sarah updated listings on Oregon Prospector and added new ones.
  • Community Connecting
    • Take Action Lincoln County now accepting 2026 Nesika Illahee Pow-Wow Dance Award Sponsorships! –  In partnership with CTSI, EDALC has launched the 3rd year of takeactionlincolncounty.com gathering online sponsorships for this summer’s Pow-Wow dance awards. After emailing last year’s sponsors yesterday, the site has already gathered 4 sponsors and $2,250. Previous years have shown the youth category sponsorships filling up first, so those who sponsor soonest can select from the widest selection of award amounts. Show your organization, business, or personal support for CTSI’s cultural traditions, become a Pow-Wow dance award sponsor today! 
  • Organizational Management
    • Marketing & Communication
        • Stacie spent more time than usual on social media strategy given that its Economic Development Week and Small Business Week. Like and share on Facebook, Instagram, and/or LinkedIn please!
    • Admin
      • FY25-26 EDALC Report – Paul continued work on the updated report, incorporating Board suggestions and bringing in some testimonial quotes. EDALC will also get some enhanced verbiage and suggestions on the project from Kelley Nonprofit Consulting (as part of our ROI consultation hours).

 

SAVE THE DATE: Our joint EDALC/YBEF annual meeting and celebration will be Wednesday, July 1st at 5:30pm at Myril’s. It took us a little while to nail down the date – the Newport Chamber annual Awards Banquet and the Newport Rotary Annual Dinner were also vying for the same short list of dates, but it’s all sorted out. Mark your calendars and invites will go out soon!

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)