The students at community college today represent the workforce available tomorrow.  If they are in trouble, it is a major red flag for CED professionals.  CED professionals need to understand the world of community college students if they are to help them develop into the workforce in the next ten … Read more

This is part of a series of posts on the topic of leadership and management as applied to community and economic development, authored by UNC School of Government faculty member Willow Jacobson. Community and economic development (CED) professionals are often responsible for managing and coordinatin … Read more

  Last month, a major three-volume book, Investing in America’s Workforce: Improving Outcomes for Workers and Employers, was launched at the Federal Reserve Bank in New York[1].  This blog focuses on just one of the 90 chapters, The Rural Dimensions of Workforce Development[2]. The chapter make … Read more

Recently, the Metropolitan Policy Program at the Brookings Institution released a comprehensive report on the state of the workforce related to water in the United States—jobs tied to drinking water, wastewater, stormwater, green infrastructure, private wells, septic systems, plumbing, and other fie … Read more

A key conceptual cousin to community economic development is the idea of “civic infrastructure.” A recent article by University of San Diego professor Keith Pezzoli defines civic infrastructure as “formal and informal institutional as well as sociocultural means of connectivity used in knowledge–act … Read more

This is part of a series of posts on the topic of leadership as applied to community and economic development, authored by UNC School of Government faculty member Willow Jacobson. We find ourselves in many situations in which we need to make a convincing argument — sometimes as part of a public pre … Read more

For the past five months I served as a visiting scholar to the University of Ghent in Belgium.   The link between food insecurity, a particular focus on my work in North Carolina, and larger overall economic insecurity issues has been getting increased focus across a number of European countries. Be … Read more

My last post argued that we should think of the role of local government in communities more in terms of “barn raising” than the more transactional metaphor of a vending machine. This idea was put forth in the great book Community and the Politics of Place by former Missoula, Montana mayor Daniel Ke … Read more

The photo was eerily familiar to anyone interested in CED.  The headline from the New York Times article on September 20, just days before the German national election, read, “Merkel Says Germans ‘Never Had It Better.’ But Many Feel Left Behind.”  The accompanying photo by Gordon Welters, shown here … Read more

I recently was asked to speak to a joint meeting of town councils of four communities in Eastern North Carolina. The subject they asked me to speak about was community engagement. What I ended up spending most of my time talking about were two frames for thinking about the role of local government i … Read more