Greetings and welcome to Friday – what a sunny, gorgeous day out there today!
FYI – we won’t be doing a weekly update next week, because of the Thanksgiving holiday and shorter work week.
Here’s our staff update for the week:
Broadband::
This week was our monthly Broadband Action Team meeting. It was mostly an update on the latest drafts of the BEAD and state broadband equity plan, which are now open for comments. We’re also working with Solarity and Rural Prosperity Partners to set up an initial Lincoln County broadband stakeholder meeting on December 1st at OCCC-Newport. Invites should be going out on Monday. – Paul
Blue Economy::
This week, we met with Colpac and their new Executive Director (they run the north coast economic development district) to get our “Blue battle plans” aligned – it looks like we’ll be able to launch some great work together at the start of the year. Mark Farley and I also met with Rural Prosperity Partners to review our *nearly finished* Blue Economy workplan for 2023-25. That’s the tool we’ll be using to help prospect and pursue future Blue finding opportunities. – Paul
Creative Economies::
I attended the ART Toledo meeting Thursday morning. I also put together some data points in reference to the AEP6 report and sent them to Senator Anderson. – Sarah
Community and Economic Development Grant Program::
The 2023-24 Community and Economic Development Grant Program (and application) is now live! Sarah and I finished up the web page copy and the supporting documents this week, and I got the new online application working (with Sarah testing it for us) early this week. a HUGE thanks to Ken Lipp for getting the content up on the county site – the press release is also going out today as well. Here’s a link to the program page: https://www.co.lincoln.or.us/973/Community-and-Economic-Development-Grant – Paul
Economic Summit::
Last week, Sarah and I made the choice to move the 2024 Lincoln County Economic Summit from January to March 14th (does not conflict with the legislative short session or Spring break!). We locked in Spyglass at Otter Crest for the location. We also secured Ben Winchester as the keynote speaker. Ben is trained as a Rural Sociologist and works as a Senior Research Fellow for the University of Minnesota Extension. We’ll keep you posted! – Paul
Entrepreneurship::
I worked on a promotional video for the SBDC’s upcoming Youth Entrepreneurship Program. – Sarah
Project Work::
This week I added all the contacts from the Arts & Culture event to our MailChimp audience. I also worked on the community and economic development grant press release, reviewed the other grant documents, updated our EDALC grant page and posted on our Facebook page about the application opening. I worked on the November board meeting minutes, updated the opportunities for entrepreneurs slider, and updated Oregon Prospector listings. – Sarah
Supporting and Connecting with Partners::
Cascades West COG – Today, I had another regional loan to review from the COG – this time, a business purchase in Albany. – Paul
Lincoln County SBDC – On Tuesday, I had the honor to serve on a webinar panel on non-traditional funding hosted by our own SBDC. It was well-attended (19 folks) and covered a myriad of funding programs and sources, from Business Oregon to Community Lending Works, micro-loans to crowd-funding and factoring. Thanks to Gregory for organizing and running such a great session. – Paul
As a reminder – your Board of Directors resource page is here:
Thanks for ALL that you are doing out there! Please reach out to me if you need anything at all. Have a wonderful weekend and a wonderful Thanksgiving Holiday next week (and remember – don’t talk politics over the pumpkin pie!)!
Cheers,
-Paul 🙂