Happy Friday and welcome to the middle of August!

I know we mentioned this in an updated earlier, but I wanted to remind you of a change in time and venue for our combined September/October EDALC Board of Directors meeting (don’t worry – we’ll send out a reminder):

We will be having a joint, in-person YBEF/EDALC meeting on Wednesday, September 25th at 5:30pm. We will be meeting at the Gladys Valley Marine Studies building (room 164) on the Hatfield campus. We’ll have some extra-tasty snacks and refreshments on hand.

The program will be the findings of the Economic Impact of the NOAA MOC-P fleet being based in Newport (local impact, county-wide impact and statewide impact). The report was funded by EDALC’s Blue Economy congressionally-directed spending award.

We’ll be joined in-person by Jennifer Lam and Paige McKibben from the Eastern Research Group – the group who put together the report (working with myself and Sarah from our office and Mark Farley from Hatfield). They’ll present their findings and have plenty of time for Q&A.

I sure hope you can join us for this interesting and important meeting. Now back to our regularly scheduled weekly update:

    • Partner Support/Community Support 
  • ART Toledo – Sarah sent out thank you cards to a couple of the sponsors and partners for the Art, Oysters & Brews event.
  • Blue Economy/O2IH
      • CDS Award – Paul completed the process and got the formal approval from the SBA to extend our CDS award project time for an additional year – until August 31, 2025. This will give us the chance to wrap up some projects and get rolling on a few things that have been unexpectedly slow to start. Also, Paul received confirmation that there are no additional audit requirements for the CDS award other than if there is over $750K in spending in a single fiscal year. Good news all around.
  • Entrepreneurship
      • ROI – Paul met with the marketing team from the Oregon Lottery today. EDALC was selected by the ROI program for a featured story of “program success using lottery dollars” (Business Oregon gets their ROI dollars from lottery income). We’ll be working with their team to set up several on location video shoots in the coming months. Paul and Sarah attended a training today on the “Your Economy” data tool – made available to ROI communities. It’s a pretty amazing deep dive into local, regional and national economic data. Greg – we’ll have to share this with you and your SBDC team – some pretty amazing stuff in there.
  • FailFest – Stacie followed up on deposit next steps. Sarah shared FF assets from last year and drafted a Punchbowl invite. Paul is reaching out to potential speakers and finalizing the budget.
  • Broadband
      • BAT – This week was the monthly Broadband Action Team meeting for our region. The BEAD infrastructure grant program is getting closer to opening up for Phase 1 applications. Paul will be reaching out to Pioneer Cooperative to discuss any potential Phase 1 projects that could happen in Lincoln County (Phase 1 has the mandate to cover an ENTIRE school district – it might make those applications very tricky to pull together). Next week, there will be a “transfer of knowledge” call with Breaking Point Solutions (the creator of the Rapid Design Studies for broadband deployment), as one of the final wrap-up steps of the EDA-funded broadband strategic planning grant.
  • Core Economic Development Services
  • Data – intern
        • Sarah met with intern Sam on his last day of work on Monday, they discussed his project and next steps for the research. Sarah began researching housing and fisheries data to add to the economic vitality report.
      • ComEcDEV Grant Program – We took the first steps to lay out the “order of operations” to launch the FY24-25 grant program with Kathleen Kellay at the county – our goal is to open things up before the end of the month, to allow for 60+ days for applications to be prepared.
  • Your Economy training
        • Sarah began looking into Business Oregon’s “Your Economy” data tool for establishment and job data. She and Paul also attended an informational meeting on that tool on Friday.
  • Community Connecting
  • OoNee Facility Tour with Central Coast Food Web (CCFW) and OOCI folks
  • Fish Butchery Program lead, Maggie Michaels, invited me to a surprise belated birthday celebration for Kristen Penner at The Yaquina Lab on Monday afternoon, which involved a delicious Chocolate Dulse Cake. Little did I know the Oregon Ocean Cluster Initiative (OOCI) and CCFW crew there were also heading upriver to the OoNee operation, part of which is 2 weeks into an 8-week study, connecting and growing multiple marketable species in on-land tank systems (Urchins, Sea Cucumbers, and two types of Seaweed). As usual, I saw the opportunity to invite myself along (and drove a carpool to contribute to the outing).
  • Organizational Management
  • Marketing & Communication
  • Stacie posted the weekly community social media roundup and created + published a media toolkit page to make it easier for partners/support recipients to access logo, social media, and publicity guidelines. Also continued to make updates to the website with Paul’s help. Goal is to have all EDALC website updates completed by the end of September.
        • Stacie has started reviewing social media reporting to figure out how best to leverage it.
  • Project Work
        • Major Employers – Sarah continued to call and email local businesses for their employment numbers. 
  • Admin
      • Stacie created a board in Monday.com for the O2IH website project with work to begin next week.

 

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, and don’t be stingy with your ideas – we love hearing from you! 

 

Cheers,

 

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