Community Vitality Update

October 2007

This newsletter provides community leaders, economic developers, entrepreneurs, and other Iowan's interested in community vitality with features on innovative strategies, updates on CVC projects, and info about opportunities for learning and networking.

Apply for Community Philanthropy Success Story Awards - $1000.

Last year CVC initiated four annual awards of $1000 to recognize success stories and best practices. This effort is designed to assist in creating a web based library that shares philanthropy-building ideas and best practices to others accessing the web. Last year’s winners were presented at the annual Community Philanthropy Academy. This year the award criteria is focused on building endowments, encouraging bequests and other end-of-life planned gifts, and creating a culture for wealth transfer gifts to enhance community vitality. The CVC is looking for 300 words or less that describe examples of innovative, dynamic, unique, or inspirational outcomes and impacts that would be helpful to other foundations and philanthropic organizations across Iowa. To recognize these achievements, CVC will again feature the award winners at future Philanthropy Academies. The first deadline is December 1, 2007. Details for submission are on the left hand menu of the CVC web site: www.cvcia.org .

Community Entrepreneurship Challenge Grant Deadline - Nov 1st.

Each year CVC provides seed funding of up to $10,000 to encourage 5 or 6 innovative local entrepreneurship development pilot projects. These grants are subject to funding availability and have supported a variety of innovative programs including, entrepreneurial resource centers, countywide entrepreneur networks, business plan competitions, regional entrepreneurial capital access improvement projects, micro-entrepreneur workshops, e-commerce workshops and sales networks, Nebraska HTC projects, economic gardening seminars, community MyEntreNet participation, home-based business networks, study tours of Sirolli and ACEnet projects, and entrepreneurial internship programs (see descriptions & maps on CVC’s homepage). Proposals are to assist community leaders in pursuit of innovative and promising programs that seek to enhance local entrepreneurship. The program explanation and 2-page application can be found on the left-hand menu of the CVC web site: www.cvcia.org . Applications are submitted by email and are due November 1, 2007 for projects to be conducted during July 2008 to June 2009.

Factors that Influence Recent Movers in Iowa’s Nonmetro Counties

The initial two reports that analyze survey responses of people who moved into and out of 19 selected counties in Iowa are now available on the CVC web page. The purpose of the survey was to identify reasons why people move into and out of Iowa’s communities and to identify actionable strategies for attracting and sustaining population. For more information, see: www.cvcia.org .

Cost Comparison of Economic Development “Grand Slams vs Bunts”

Recent public reports of incentives for attracting a Toyota plant to Tupelo provide an opportunity to make an interesting comparison of the costs per job created between efforts to attract big companies and small business and microenterprise development efforts. A recent seminar invitation provided an opportunity to pull together some comparisons.

Tupelo landed a Toyota plant in February 2007. The Toyota plant promised 2,000 jobs with average annual pay of $40,000 per worker. The total incentive package was $296 million which comes to $148,000 per job. Lets compare that with the outcomes from a Sirolli project which is a fairly expensive but nationally known entrepreneurial development program operating in many rural states. One project that has collected ten years of data, generated 54 jobs annually at an annualized cost of about $100,000 per year. That comes to $1,852 per job.

Costs per direct job created are not the only evaluation criteria that experts use. Indirect jobs created are important and the Toyota plant generated about $650,000 of new investment per job, which is likely to be 10-20 times greater than the new investment per job created by micro business startups and expansions. But the point is that most communities are not well positioned to go after the grand slam companies. The policy question for many Iowan's: “How much should be devoted towards attracting the large “grand slams” versus ‘hitting bunts to first base’ and making the deal flow work at the small business and microenterprise end of the spectrum?” For more details see “Cost of Job Creation: Toyota vs Sirolli” by clicking on "Community Entrepreneurship Information" on the CVC website.

CVC Celebrates Five Years as a Catalyst

The 2007 annual report is now available on the CVC Web site. The report highlights another year of project outcomes in community entrepreneurship, community philanthropy and rural-urban policy studies leading to actionable strategies for improving vitality. In June, CVC Board members reviewed the accomplishments of the first five years and identified opportunities for creating even greater impacts during the next five years. The strategic connections between philanthropy and entrepreneurship will likely be one area of focus.

Comments and CVC Contacts

If you have comments, suggestions, innovative ideas, or community success stories, please email cvc@iastate.edu and indicate your comment. If you would no longer like to receive this newsletter or are receiving duplicates, simply type “duplicate” or “unsubscribe” in the subject line.