Greetings and welcome to a gorgeous Friday!

 

On Thursday, the whole team descended on the Little Whale Cove Library for our annual off-site retreat. Each team member led a discussion focused on future EDALC work, including discussions on strategic priorities, organizational vision, the 2026 Economic Summit, the use of passports to pull in non-invasive event visitor data and how to better use Monday.com to track and manage our projects. 

 

The team even took a break to play the fun board game Abducktion (about ducks being abducted by a UFO). At the end of the day, the team headed to an ocean overlook to enjoy some Oregon pinot noir and watch a mother and calf grey whale feeding amongst the kelp beds. Once again, a productive and energizing time for all!

 

Here’s our weekly team update:

 

    • Partner Support/Community Support 
  • TALC – Stacie updated Previous Sponsors page with 2025 sponsor list provided by Leslie.
  • Blue Economy/O2IH
      • Challenger Biosciences – Paul is working with principal Don Gerhart to draft an ask letter to Schmidt Marine Technology Partners for $25,000 to help in the planning of a new round of funding requests for the green methanol project.
  • O2IH Website – Stacie updated the Resource Explorer and after learning more about SEO made improvements to existing content based on what she learned.
  • Entrepreneurship
      • Business Oregon Technical Assistance Grant – Paul is close to putting together the project budgets for the various technical assistance projects after speaking with Gregory early this week. He’ll wrap up those figures and get them off to Rural Prosperity Partners early next week. They will then craft the narrative of the grant and pull the materials together for a submission in about three weeks.
      • ROI Grant – The team met with the Central Coast Food Web and OCVA to see if a joint ROI grant application made sense – it didn’t (too few ROI resources to cover all the project work desired). It looks like OCVA will do their own grant application, but coast-wide, so as not to be in competition with EDALC’s application. Paul also put together a preliminary project list for the upcoming application narrative (due at the end of September).
  • Core Economic Development Services
  • Major Employers Report – Sarah called and emailed lots of businesses for their employment numbers for the major employers report.
  • Oregon Prospector – Sarah updated Oregon Prospector listings, including adding a new industrial development opportunity at the Newport Airport. 
  • Community Connecting
      • Next Round of FFF funding – Paul signed the grant agreement for the next round of funding supporting Leslie’s Community Connector work. If you remember, this is a 50% cut in funding (due to TFFF reducing the resources put into their community building programs). The grant is for $45,000.
      • See Leslie’s full weekly update here: August 22, 2025 EDALC CC Weekly Report
  • Organizational Management
  • Marketing & Communication
        • It was website update week for Stacie. She also shared relevant partner/regional posts on various social media channels – as well as the usual Friday roundup of central coast goings on. 
  • Admin
  • Policy manual – Following Jason’s suggestion, Paul met with Bryan from Sasquatch HR to discuss the creation of an organizational policy manual (including the specific policies discussed in our last BoD meeting). The project is underway, and we should see our first draft of the policy manual next week.
  • Strategic planning – Paul met with Kaety Jacobson today to discuss facilitating an update of our organizational vision statement, plus the creation of a three-year, high level strategic plan. We’ll receive a proposal from Kaety within the next two weeks. She also offered some suggestions of where to go for some small, quick-turnaround grant funds to cover the costs.
  • Monday.com – Stacie updated project boards and primary dashboard in preparation for the Monday.com discussion during the team retreat.

 

Reminder: EDALC’s September Board of Directors meeting will be on Thursday, September 4th at 3:30pm, via Zoom. Agenda and calendar invite will be going out 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 – we love hearing from you! Have a wonderful weekend!

 

Cheers,

 

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