Day 66: Economic Development is a Team Sport

Day 66:  Economic development is a team sport:  I recently have experienced a situation where city government didn’t feel that the nonprofit economic development group was doing enough.  The city was giving a substantial amount of money to the organization.  It is a small city of 15,000.  So the city hired their own economic development person.  It was too bad that they did this.  Economic development can’t be done in a vacuum.  It takes everyone to be successful.  What we did in this situation was sitting down with the city and made an agreement on who was going to be responsible for different activities.  There is plenty of work to do.  What caused this split to occur was a lack of communication on the nonprofits part.  Of course being in a recession didn’t help the activity level much either. So if you find yourself in a similar situation, face it head on and work hard to work together.  If the city and the nonprofit go their separate ways the community will not have very much success.  The city will need a nonprofit group to do certain things.  We will be meeting at least monthly to make sure communication is kept open.  The key is to always remember you all are working towards the same common goal:  Improve the community.  Next:  Should I have a spec building?

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