Building Capacity for Economic Development: STC Partnership Program
Partnerships among community groups, governments, and local professionals of different disciplines are required to successfully design and sustain community economic development projects. As relationships are formed, communities develop greater capacity to enhance growth and meet community needs. Working with a task force of local professionals and support from the Appalachian Regional Commission, New York's STC Partnership Program provides approximately 225 hours of in-depth technical assistance to communities with identified local needs and projects. Municipalities contribute $5,000, designate a team of local leaders, and agree to develop and implement a detailed scope of work. Projects have included water and sewer studies, downtown revitalization initiatives, and the development of requests for proposals to meet defined community needs. Because the project requires intensive time commitments, only four communities are selected to participate each year. The project advisory committee plans to ensure sustainability by integrating the program into existing community and local government structures, encouraging multi-community partnerships, expanding technical assistance services for nonprofit agencies, and developing ways that will insure the program continues to be available to smaller communities with short-term project needs.
Training Grassroots Leaders for Community Development
Appalachian communities have a growing need for grassroots leaders to plan and design approaches to local development issues and opportunities. In Alabama, a grant from ARC to the YourTown Alabama leadership program is helping address that need. YourTown Alabama's training teaches participants how to develop strategic vision, translate broad concepts into achievable goals, and address specific development, preservation, and environmental issues within the context of the community's vision. The program is also training youth leaders to participate in local initiatives and providing follow-up training for program graduates. In fiscal year 2001, over 100 leaders from throughout the state were trained. Teaching Civic Leadership Skills to Youths: Ohio-West Virginia YMCA's HI-Y Leadership Programs
The Ohio-West Virginia YMCA's leadership programs reach out to successful teens, to teens who need to turn their lives from failure to achievement, and to those in the middle who need to be challenged to reach their potential. Summer entrepreneurship and civic leadership residential camps prepare teens to offer strengthened leadership to their student groups, schools, and communities. School-year locally based HI-Y programs helps teens learn to work together to plan, refine, and carry out their community improvement initiatives. In statewide Youth in Government programs, teens learn to share and gain wider perspectives on how to renew community life back home. Key partnerships with the business community, state departments of education, adult civic groups, chambers of commerce, state development offices, local schools, and faith communities make this program a success.
Project Contact:
David King, Executive Director
OH-WV YMCA
Rt. 2, Box 138
St. George, WV 26287
Telephone: 304-478-2481
Fax: 304-478-4446
email: hi-y@hi-y.org
Web site: www.hi-y.org
Teaching Leadership Skills for Community Improvement
West Virginia's Flex-E-Grant program is an innovative new approach to developing local leadership in the state's 27 distressed counties, providing mini-grants to projects designed to increase leadership skills. Project focuses include curriculum development for leadership training, resource network development, and strategic planning. In designing the program, the West Virginia Development Office collaborated with numerous state and local community-building organizations. The Claude Worthington Benedum Foundation is cosponsoring the project, providing funding and evaluation assistance and hosting a leadership symposium. Twenty-two projects have been funded in the program's first year, benefiting nearly three dozen communities.
Working to Bring Home the Best and the Brightest: Hale Builders of Positive Partnerships Program
Concerned that many high-achieving high school students do not return to live in Hale County, Alabama, after college, the county's Hale Empowerment and Revitalization Organization Family Resource Center created a youth leadership program to encourage young people to build personal and professional lives in this distressed area of western Alabama. Over 20 student leaders from county high schools were chosen as the first participants in the Hale Builders of Positive Partnerships (BOPP) program. With support from the Appalachian Regional Commission, these "Hale BOPP Comets" received training in leadership and business skills, learned about local history and culture, and took part in local service projects. The University of Alabama, Auburn University, and Shelton State Community College cooperated in activities geared toward building problem-solving skills, encouraging responsibility, and revealing the value of long-term community commitment. The program has been so successful that it has expanded to include additional training and educational opportunities for the Comets during their senior year of high school and continued contact after graduation.
Leadership in ActionEmpowering Rural Residents to Help Themselves: Smith Ridge Self-Help Water Project
In 1998 the residents of Smith Ridge—a rural town of about 150 people in Tazewell County, Virginia—banded together to construct a new water supply system for their community, which had long relied on cisterns, springs, or wells for water. Given its small population and remote, mountainous location, the town had seen little prospect of improving its water supply. However, an innovative program that helps people in small towns help themselves tapped "sparkplug" leaders in the community to oversee the project, and with support from the state's Department of Housing and Community Development, residents banded together and built a seven-mile water-line extension to serve their homes. More than 60 residents, including nearly every able-bodied adult in the town, volunteered to help. As a result, the project cost about $250,000—75 percent less than a contractor's estimated cost of over $1 million—and the extension took only three months to complete, as opposed to the expected 18 months. The experience of working together and accomplishing so much catalyzed interest in other community projects, such as cleanup and road safety programs.
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