Greetings and happy Friday! It looks like at least some of the weekend will be gorgeous, and I plan to tackle some grilled wings tonight.
Here’s our EDALC update for the week:
====
Rural Opportunity Initiative – On Monday, I submitted our application documents to BusinessOregon for the ROI program Concept Phase, and received confirmation that they were received. Melissa Murphy is also going to reach out to the program director to put a little positive nudge in there for our application. We expect to hear back by October 20th. I think we’ve got a great shot at this!
O2IH/EDA Build Back Better, Phase 1 (internal deadline is end of the month) – This week was all about working with partners on the Phase One narrative verbiage and lining up letters of support (we’re looking at close to 50!). Birgitte and her OCCC team also spent quite a lot of time connecting with the coast community college and setting parameters and expectations for curriculum, degree and certification development as well as talking through how the WERC building fits into the larger project. I also spent some time researching and boning up on venture capital investing and how it might be leveraged for Blue Economy work. We also had meetings with most of our congressional delegations and they’ll be working to assemble a single collective letter of support for the application. Next week will be a real push to get everything together.
Funding Research – I spent some time this week on a Zoom with Sean Gibbs, Executive Director of the South Coast Development Council. I was doing some research into their tiered level of business support for their economic development organization, and they have an approach that might be a great way to engage our larger local businesses in supporting economic development work.
Economic Summit – We made the call this week to move the Newport Chamber’s Economic Summit from November to January – both for COVID concerns and to give us all more time to better line up panelists and speakers.
SVMC Economic Recovery Team – This months South Valley-Mid Coast team meeting focused on childcare and various challenges and opportunities. I talked to the group about the SBDC’s childcare startup course and the changes in the county’s grant program. There was also some discussion about Bend’s “childcare accelerator” program and Sarah Means is looking to invite the director to our next meeting to discuss their program and approaches.
Newport Chamber After Hours – Susan and I attended the first in-person Newport Chamber After Hours event in over a year – held at CrossCountry Mortgage. A good turn out and a good chance for networking, but boy, are people unsure how to handle in-person events like that these days!
Community and Economic Development Grants – The news release and web page went up today for the modified grant program. Next, I’ll do a little work on when we should schedule the virtual grant workshop. We’ll also need to brainstorm some potential external reviewers (max three, for the different topic areas) for the additional SME review of the larger grant applications. Here is link to the page: https://www.co.lincoln.or.us/boc/page/community-and-economic-development-grant
(Way to go Linda for helping to push the grant post from our Facebook page!)
As a reminder – your Board of Directors resource page is here:
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 🙂