Greetings and welcome to Friday! What a wet and rainy week, but it looks like we might have a lovely weekend. Susan and are are semi-settled into our new digs – last night was our first night there. Dog Stella is taking it in stride (with the help of some CDB treats!).
Here’s our EDALC update for the week:
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Well, the hits keep on coming (“hits” as in “it’s got a beat and you can dance to it,” not “ouch, that hurts”) – we received word late yesterday that EDALC was one of the new applicants accepted into Business Oregon’s competitive Rural Opportunity Initiative program. Woo hoo!
While this isn’t a stratospheric dollar amount, the funding is significant (up to $350,000 over seven years), it provides the scaffolding to bring in municipal financial support (Lincoln City, Newport and Toledo at the get-go), can hopefully be a trigger for some financial support of economic development from the county, and it comes with some capacity-building work for us from Business Oregon.
ROI will help us do meaningful work on two of our strategic priorities: entrepreneurial ecosystem development and Blue Economy support. It’s also a vital tool for us to build long-term financial stability for our organization to support the good work we do. Honestly, this was the one I was really hoping for, since it sets us on a solid path and also aligns with my economic development passions. We’ve got the start of a great coalition built (the above-mentioned municipalities plus the SBDC) that we hope to expand over the next few years. And we did this 100% in-house – there are going to be some happy toasts of bubbly at the Schuytema homestead this weekend. All in all, not a bad birthday present for Paul! 🙂
We’ll work on getting a release out next week.
O2IH – This week, our core logistical team (Mark, Rachael, Sherry and myself) had several meetings to talk through large-scale project planning and how the Congressionally Directed Spending award dovetails with the EDA Build Back Better application (both from the project side and the budgetary side). It looks like we’re going to use a combination of Excel and Miro (a very flexible web-based team planning, brainstorming and management system – it plays well to both Mark and my right-brain sensibilities). The congressional funds might be coming in a few months later than Senator Merkley’s office initially indicated, so we’re pausing for a while the the press release, but we’ve got a great set of quotes and a draft realize nearly ready to go.
Community and Economic Development Grant – Kristi Peter and I facilitated a grant workshop on Tuesday afternoon with about a dozen attendees. It was an info-packed hour of grant information, including discussion on the larger grant and some pointers on writing a quality application. I put together a “sceamsheet” of grant writing tips to share with folks – you can check it out here: https://businesslincolncounty.com/file_uploads/com_ecdev_screamsheet.pdf
I was a guest on Casey Miller’s weekly radio show this week to talk about the grant (podcast here: https://www.co.lincoln.or.us/boc/page/county-connections-2021). I also had a great conversation with a broadband cooperative about a potential broadband application that sounds pretty exciting. As of today, we’ve got fourteen active applications for the grant program with I’m sure several more to come next week.
Exploring Future Funding Opportunities – Rachael, Sherry and I spent some time talking through “prospecting” for one or two other funding opportunities for EDALC with the search focusing on providing funds and/or capacity for developing a county-wide economic development plan of work, tourism entrepreneurship development as well as executive director development (apparently it’s a “thing”). I’ll keep you posted on any opportunities that come up.
As a reminder – your Board of Directors resource page is here:
Another reminder – next Thursday is our November Board of Directors meeting – here’s the Zoom link:
Time: Nov 4, 2021 03:30 PM Pacific Time (US and Canada)
Join Zoom Meeting
https://us06web.zoom.us/j/9178104987?pwd=bVJDN0VlUEM3aG9EaFhJQUZjcDJHUT09
Meeting ID: 917 810 4987
Passcode: 0NyksK
As a pleasant aside, our local move was far less fraught with incompetence and damage than our cross -ountry move. Only one piece of furniture bit the dust (it was one that was nearly destroyed during our move last year that I “Frankensteined” back together with wood glue and straps), and they came in at 50% of their estimated costs – woo hoo! In a fun small-world moment, the moving foreman was the same mover who moved out our seller, so they knew the house. And he previously lived in Iron River, Michigan – the town where I worked in the Upper Peninsula (it was our “big city” at just over 2,000 folks).
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 🙂