The “How” of Economic Development

An economic development strategic plan that is superb at describing specific activities to enhance a community becomes the proverbial report-sitting-on-the-shelf if it is not backed by a local team with the capacity to implement the plan.

In his upcoming book, Building Communities: 25 Strategies to Advance America, author and economic development practitioner Brian Cole presents a new tool for cities, counties, and economic development professionals to ensure that they have the capacity to successfully implement economic development activities.

Referred to as the Community Organizer tool, economic development practitioners and the volunteers that support them ask and answer a series of questions that define the capacity of the community to implement the strategic plans that they create.

What good is it, for example, to accurately target businesses to recruit if there is not qualified staff to recruit the businesses? How can development organizations successfully advance strategies when they spend over half of their time chasing the membership dues simply to keep the organization afloat? How can communities help to expand existing businesses without the programs or resources to support business? All of these are the capacity issues defined in the Community Organizer tool.

The Community Organizer tool, presented specifically for business development activities as well as community development activities, offers a series of scenarios. These scenarios each describe a stage of capacity that currently may exist for communities.

Community leaders will identify their current capacity as well as their ideal capacity, and the Community Organizer tool will prescribe a series of activities to enhance capacity in order that the strategic plan can be successfully implemented.

In short, the Building Communities approach does not simply define the “what should we do?” aspect of economic development, but also presents the “how can we do it?” aspect.