USDA Rural Development recently announced KARDO has been awarded $117,000 in the form of an Rural Business Enterprise Grant (RBEG). This was done in support of KARDO’s proposal to produce and implement a series of workshops designed to benefit emerging and existing small businesses in 25 targeted counties. The workshops will occur over a year’s time and focus on improving the service capacities and capabilities of KARDO members and others serving the target group.
Workshops described in the proposal include:
1. Peer-to-Peer Visit. Cheryal Lee Hills, Executive Director of Region Five Development Commission in Minnesota, will travel to Kansas and spend a day with her Kansas counterparts. Cheryal will detail the problems organizations like hers face in Minnesota and how they have been able to overcome those and other diversities. She will also describe programs her organization has produced to address the needs of small business in her region.
2. “Strategic Doing“. Ed Morrison, Economic Policy Advisor for the Purdue Center for Regional Development at Purdue University, will come to Kansas to deliver a three-day “train-the-trainer” workshop on “strategic doing” and then facilitate four (4) one-day regional workshops held at various locations around the state. “Strategic planning” and “strategic thinking” are well-known terms and have been driving everyone’s effort for the past 20 years. And while the latter two are still part of the programmatic mix of required processes, “Strategic Doing” is something new on the horizon and needs to be explored. A product developed by Morrison himself over a 15-year period, “strategic doing’ is an open network-based model that emphasizes focused collaboration and innovation in solving economic development as well as other community development issues.
3. “Ice House Entrepreneurship Program“. Offered by the Kauffman Foundation in Kansas City, the Ice House Entrepreneurship Program offers people a different perspective on just what makes an entrepreneur. Delivered on-line, this program introduces takers to real-life experiences drawn from the book Who Owns The Ice House? Using chalkboard style presentations, video interviews and case histories featuring modern-day examples of entrepreneurs, those enrolled will learn over the period how they and others can overcome the various diversities faced by small business in rural Kansas.
4. Capital Improvements Planning. Beth Tatarko and Becky Crowder, principals of The Austin-Peters Group, will produce a workbook describing the capital improvements planning process and then facilitate six (6) workshops held at various locations across the state. The workshops will be open to all interested parties, but most especially KARDO members and their constituent cities and counties. These workshops will illustrate the process of capital improvements planning and provide a ready to use computer program that will enable attendees to utilize the process in their own operations.
5. “Keeping the Public in Public-Private Partnerships”. The National Development Council (NDC) located in Lexington, Kentucky, will present a two-day workshop for up to 50 people on the subject. This is a course that looks beyond conventional techniques for financing and building needed facilities. Information offered by the course will assist those helping local governments who with to provide some degree of financial support to small business, but who have reached their debt limits or who wish to get things done faster than is otherwise possible solely through the public domain.
6. Data Mining and Illustration. This workshop will be facilitated by the state’s two University Centers. First, the Advanced Manufacturing Institute (AMI) at Kansas State University, will review its use of datasets produced by Economic Modeling Specialists Intl., showing the KARDO membership just what data is available. Next, the Institute for Public and Social Research (IPSR) at The University of Kansas, will provide a review of various data illustration techniques. Combination of the two will help KARDO members to better quantify trends in local and regional economies as well as offer illustration of those trends so people can better visualize their surrounding economic environment.
7. Meeting of Partners. Towards the end of the project period, arrangements will be made with various federal, state and nonprofit agencies and organizations to sit down and discuss how the regional organizations can better access and offer the programs those invited offer. It will also give all attendees the opportunity to better get to know one another.
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