Greetings and welcome to Friday! It looks to be a beautiful weekend before the rains kick in later this month – get those grills heated up and ready for action. Remember that Monday is the first day of Fall!

 

Newport Pride events are this weekend – here’s the link to all that’s going on: https://www.newportoregonpride.com/

 

Next week is the Coastal Caucus Economic Summit in North Bend (https://www.eventbrite.com/e/oregon-coast-economic-summit-tickets-1295106681949) – Paul is attending and will also be speaking on a panel during the event.

 

Here’s our weekly team update:

 

    • Partner Support/Community Support
      • CWEDD – This week, Paul signed the contract with the COG for the Economic Development District video project. Sarah will dive into video planning next week. Paul (as Chair of CWEDD) also officially signed the resolution adopting the Comprehensive Economic Development Strategy for the region, to be submitted to the Economic Development Administration.
      • Newport Chamber of Commerce – Paul and Marshall attended the Newport CoC’s Board Retreat on Tuesday to review policy changes, the organization’s by-laws and start the strategic planning brainstorming process.
      • Rural Prosperity Partners – Paul met with RPP to discuss multiple sources of possible cash matches for an EDA Disaster Supplemental application. He is also working to coordinate a conversation with Newport grant writer Cathy Rigby to discuss this and another potential collaborative grant.
  • Entrepreneurship
      • Cascades West Innovation Hub – Today, Paul attended a Leadership Team meeting for the Innovation Hub. The upcoming “front door” training event on October 3rd in Linn County was discussed, as well as program metrics and alignment with Business Oregon over the next 18 months. Drafts of subgrantee contracts (EDALC will be one of two subgrantees) should be going out next week.
      • Rural Opportunity Initiative – The whole team worked most of the week on our 2025-2027 Rural Opportunity Initiative grant application. This application is for the third and final stage in our ROI “journey” – the Scale Stage. The total project comes in at just over $225,000, with a request from the Business Oregon program for just over $150,000. The grant was submitted this afternoon with 11 strong letters of support. Thanks SO MUCH to all of you that helped bolster our application with a letter of support! 
  • Broadband
      • Broadband Action Team – Paul attended the September BAT meeting on Thursday. Top news was that the Oregon Broadband Office announced their BEAD awardees (which still need to be approved by the NTIA in Washington). In Lincoln County, the awardees were Astound ($14,174,118), Pioneer Connect ($1,312,439) and Starlink ($39,050). Across the state, Starlink (the low Earth orbit satellite provider owned by Elon Musk) accounted for just over 46% of all of the Broadband Serviceable Locations (and in some counties, 100%). Starlink did a “batch” application across all of Oregon (and other states as well), offering to provide service for $550 per BSL – the price of the Starlink receiver. With the low cost option removed by the federal government, Starlink will cost consumers $120/month (average broadband now costs $75/month in Oregon). In addition, Starlink users can’t have a density of over six locations per square mile or operate in heavily wooded areas and still keep the minimum required speed. The NTIA has 90 days to respond to Oregon’s BEAD funding recommendations – we’ll keep you posted.
  • Core Economic Development Services
  • Entrepreneur support – Sarah helped connect a new Lincoln County resident with information about getting their LLC transferred to Oregon and to receive business consulting from Kelliane at the SBDC.
  • Oregon Prospector – Sarah updated Oregon Prospector listings.
  • Community Connecting
  • Café Aquarium 2025 – The planning, communications, and implementation of this multilingual event at the Oregon Coast Aquarium kept Leslie from last week’s report (and was well-worth all the time and effort). Leading up to the event, Leslie created an introduction video on the event check-in and passport concept. This video link, the event map, and the details for Tabling Organizations document were sent out to all 31 participating organizations and the volunteers (including OCCC Nursing Program students and folks from Lincoln County’s Community Response Team) to best prepare folks… (see more details in Leslie’s 2-week report). 

During the event, It was incredible to see all the families check in and check out with positive energy, full bags of resources, and filled-in Event Passports showing how many tables they visited. The continual positive feedback from attendees and organization representatives gave an uplifting, buoyant energy throughout the night, and Leslie was extremely grateful for the safe, well-supported community turnout. 

This week, Leslie created a Qualtrics survey version of the Passport and entered all the photographed passport documents for more detailed data extraction and the eventual incentive raffle. Attendees have until the 23rd to fill in an online survey for an additional raffle entry. Otherwise, the teams’ raffle entries correspond to the number of tables they received initials from on Friday. 

Leslie also created a Qualtrics feedback survey for partner organizations, volunteers, and event sponsors, which was sent out Wednesday afternoon. Leslie will be extracting more information after the attendee and partner survey deadlines arrive, but some details from this week’s analyses are: 

Event Data gathered from Event Passports*: 

* These numbers include those who signed in on Event Passports, they do not yet include those who attended as volunteers, tabling representatives, or other support roles.

Total Adults: 150

Total Kids: 99

Total Adults + Kids: 249

Total # of Passports after Check-in: 76

Total # of Passports Checked-out: 67

Total Organizational Table Visits Marked on Checked-out Passports: 1,437

Average table visits per Checked-out Passport: 21

Languages Spoken by Attendee Teams: 

  • Spanish: 91%
  • Mam: 5%
  • English: 35%
  • Other: 3% (Akateco and German)
  • Teams that spoke more than one language: 34%

A HUGE thank you goes out to all those who contributed to the success of Friday’s event. Leslie looks forward to sharing more details and information about the outcomes and feedback in the weeks ahead.

  • Organizational Management
  • Marketing & Communication
  • Stacie shared relevant partner/regional posts on various social media channels – as well as the usual Friday roundup of central coast goings on.
  • Admin
      • Stacie started Hootsuite training this week and attended her first Leadership Lincoln class on Wednesday.

 

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)