Articles on Community Economic Development

Does your community have a good economy or a bad one? Your economic developers will say a good one, and they will point to growth, jobs, amenities, development, and more. Yet, your community developers will say a bad one and cite poverty, homelessness, food deserts, lack of mobility, lack of wealth-building, and deteriorating access to healthcare. Why the tale of two cities? And what do we do about it? First we must understand the physics of our economy, so we can then alter it for better community outcomes over time.

Online advertising has become gamified consumerism. Increasingly, we buy online advertising because the advertising platforms give us satisfying evidence that something is happening on the screen. We buy reach, views, and clicks because it feels good when we get them, a rush, a fix. Social media taught us to crave the quantified social reaction. Advertising platforms then turned that same psychological device into a business model to sell clicks.

While Shop Local campaigns may generate a slight bump in local sales for a few weeks, the results are usually mediocre and temporary. This is not a criticism of the people running these campaigns. The problem is, instead, with the nature of the Shop Local campaign itself. Ditch your Shop Local Campaign for a Discover Local initiative, and see a permanent change in local consumer behavior.

A Small Business Debt Fund can save your community’s local small businesses from extractive debt cycles that kill small businesses and send money out of the local economy.

Category Marketing: How Small Businesses Win The Art If David would have walked out to meet Goliath with sword and shield, he would surely have been destroyed. If the American Revolutionaries would have marched out to meet the Red Coats in an open field, they would surely have been decimated. The secret to competing with…

Are the people of your community getting richer or poorer? Well, by isolated metrics, like wages and 401ks, one could argue richer. But by lived experience, in relation to the important expenses of our lives and our ability to build wealth over time, the clear answer is poorer. But why? The answer is woven into our economic system.

There is no better workforce investment than my wife. My wife is a counselor at a small, rural, Title I elementary school in South Carolina. How much money is being spent to address the soft-skills crisis in the US right now? How many billions of dollars? How many employers report that workers struggle with communication, teamwork, adaptability, conflict management, and self-regulation? Working with adults is triage. We must invest in the future of our workforce.

Economic Developers have traditionally focused on business recruitment and real estate development. Now we find ourselves in workforce development, skills training, soft-skills, even transportation and childcare. We need a new perspective on what it means to serve a community in Economic Development.

More people are getting poorer over time. We must evolve our understanding of the economy so that we can see the pending crisis that lurks underneath. Only then can we design the changes that will avoid calamity and create a better future for all.

York County should invest significantly in developing the “Agriconomy” (as I call it) – agri-business, agri-tourism, agri-lifestyle, etc. – in the western part of the county.