Greetings and welcome to Friday! Looks like the rain is here to stay awhile – now I just need to remind the dog to do her business with a little more alacrity when the raindrops are falling!
Here’s our EDALC update for the week:
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First, let’s start this update with some AWESOME news – We received word this week from Senator Merekly’s office that our O2IH “Congressionally Directed Spending Item” made the final cut and was approved – that will mean $1 million flowing into EDALC when those funds are released (probably January)! We’re working on a press release as well as a battle plan for the projects outlined in the appropriation bill. EDALC will receive some administrative support dollars and will also provide some key work on the projects and other dollars will flow through us (such as to OSU’s Advantage Accelerator). Today, we had three meetings to talk through project logistics. This is incredible news for multiple reasons: real work will be able to get started on O2IH priorities and real funds will be coming into EDALC. Huzzahs all around, with special high-fives to Mark Farley and the team at Sequoia Consulting!
In related AWESOME news, this from Birgitte:
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We also got a call from Wyden’s office. Via this same federal process, $503K was also approved for OCCC to expand access to healthcare education in North County, adding a state-of-the- art SIM lab in our Lincoln City site, and a bunch of pretty cool technology to support remote learning access.
It will be a busy year, that’s for certain.
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O2IH/EDA Build Back Better, Phase 1 – This from Bob, earlier in the week:
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The proposal has been officially submitted. Thanks for all of your help in pulling this together – especially Mark, Rachel and Paul. You all make great cat herders!! With any luck the real work of a Phase 2 proposal will be upon us soon.
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Rural Opportunity Initiative – Business Oregon was supposed to let applicants know about the results on October 20th, but no word came down. I reached out to Brian Plinski, the ROI program director, and his response was: “I’m hopeful we’ll be able to make award announcements next week.” So still keeping those fingers and toes crossed on that front.
Northwest Oregon Works – I had a call this week with Heather DeSart and her team to talk about ways to better interface with their new Business Services Manager Jerry Hardman (who I met with a few weeks back). As it turns out, it looks like the grant funding for his position is gone, so they will be without that position starting next week (it was a slightly awkward call and I could totally sense Heather’s frustration). So we’ll circle back next week and see how we can better integrate knowledge of their programs into the business community and co-develop some web and print content to that end. But before Jerry hit to road to do some elk hunting, he did pull a number of business sector reports for me from his expensive whiz-bang database!
Lemelson Foundation Convening on Blue Innovation – I was fortunate to be invited to participate in this event yesterday – about forty folks came together to talk about the current state of the Blue Economy innovation ecosystem on the Central Coast. It was an awesome event, co-facilitated by Hatfield, the Lemelson Foundation and Business Oregon. There were several well-directed breakout room discussions and idea sharing with a very high signal-to-noise ratio. I’m looking forward to learning about the next steps – it’s an aspect of business development that I’m very passionate about.
Community and Economic Development Grant – Kristi Peter and I will be facilitating a virtual (via Zoom) workshop on the county grant program next Tuesday at 1:30pm. We met via Zoom yesterday to go over the flow and who will be doing what. I’ll also be on Casey Miller’s radio show next week to promote the grant. So far, it looks like we’ve already got about a dozen applications started in the online portal.
Here’s a link to info on the workshop:
https://www.newportnewstimes.com/community/economic-development-alliance-to-host-virtual-grant-workshop/article_e660de86-3120-11ec-b6a6-835bac19c967.html
As a reminder – your Board of Directors resource page is here:
Susan and I headed over to our new (to us) house in Depoe Bay last night to crack a bottle of champagne and eat some cold fried chicken while our pooch Stella sniffed every corner of her new domain. We’ve got cleaners in there today as well as painters. Our “big move” day will be next Thursday, but we’ll be moving our art and smaller boxes over this weekend. Pretty darned exciting!
Have a wonderful weekend! Thanks for ALL that you are doing out there! Please reach out to me if you need anything at all.
Cheers,
-Paul 🙂