Conversations with advisory board members – Part 2

Community and Economic Development – Blog by UNC School of Government

https://ced.sog.unc.edu

Conversations with advisory board members – Part 2

By CED Guest Author

Published September 15, 2009

Here are notes from the second conversation –

– Worry that waiting to decide criteria after looking at strategies will lead in the wrong direction
– Question the ability of strategies to create living wage incomes – it all comes down to living wages/incomes, or at least the possibility for living wage
– Worried that you are going to end up with strategies that do not have the capacity to get to living wage or income
– Want to look at strategies that have certain targeted communities/populations
– Should identify criteria upfront – need to acknowledge that there are good strategies out there and what defines them
– Distinction between tactics and strategies – strategies are higher level; tactics are specific ways to go about implementing the poverty reduction/asset or wealth building strategy
– May or may not want to examine the observation that amenity rich almost always creates amenity poor and look at how to deal with the unintended consequences of concentration of wealth in rural ares, how fates of the areas are connected
– Areas that are successful seem to be those that think about connectivity to urban areas
– Suggestions for contacts/organizations –
1. Bill Bishop at the Daily Yonder – ask him to let us use the site to connect to people and put out a call for “nominations” to hear about strategies others think are working best
2. Mil Duncan at the Carsey Center
3. Rachel Stuart at the New Hampshire Community Foundation – does work in northern NH where there were a number of paper mills that have exited
4. Kelly Lucas at the Community Foundation of South Wood County – in Wisconsin Rapids, WI; workforce development in rural settings
5. Janet Topolski – Aspen Institute
6. Peter Pennekamp at the Humboldt Area Foundation – runs a community foundation in the Redwoods; area facing the loss of the timber industry and wealth folks from San
Fransisco buying property
7. Nancy Straw at West Central Initiative – in Minnesota; a fund doing good CED work
8. Lanetta Gilbert at the Ford Foundation – senior program officer who knows a lot about work in the African American communities in the rural South
9. Gayle Williams at Mary Reynolds Babcock Foundation
10. Justin Maxson at MACED
11. Jeff Yost at Nebraska Community Foundation  – doing interesting wealth creation and wealth transfer work
12. Bernadine Joselyn at the Bladin Foundation – in Grand Rapids. MN; doing work around rural broadband and around the forest products industry and creating a new competitor
that is place-specific; she is plugged in to the timber dependent community
– For me, everything comes down to living wage jobs – $15-$20/hr with benefits in 2-3 years
– Think about how many steps away from living wage jobs a tactic is – does it create a living wage job or give people skills to obtain/maintain a living wage job?
– Think about a diagram that puts key outcomes in center of diagram – health care, education, etc. support living wages and are connected but we’re choosing to look at a few, and while important, those are not the focus of the report
– Rural communities need to create a new economy and a new culture –  most successful rural communities are the ones that are doing both, with intentionally or not