Economic Development Essentials: Maximizing Strategy, Impact, and Equity

Course Details

Economic-development initiatives present amazing opportunities for economic growth and improvements to quality of life, but they also can pose a challenge. Vague or overly ambitions plans and plans that leave out lower-income or underserved populations can undermine economic-development efforts and harm the perception of planning. To be optimally successful, these efforts must have tangible goals, clear geographic constraints, and explicit benchmarks for measuring success. Presenters share best practices in economic development, beginning with clearly defining goals and identifying locales and populations that planners seek to benefit. They explain how and when to engage partner organizations and community members to establish trust and ensure true representation. Finally, they tell how to establish achievable and measurable success benchmarks and evaluate an initiative's effectiveness over time. Leave with stronger skills for creating effective and inclusive economic-development initiatives and plans.

Learning Outcomes

• Understand the elements of an effective economic-development initiative.
• Learn how to conduct effective community outreach and create true partnerships that establish trust and identify what community members really think, feel, and need.
• Pick up techniques for establishing feasible and measurable benchmarks for success and evaluating your initiative's effectiveness over time.

The NPC Peer Reviewers assigned this presentation a learning level of Advanced. For more on learning level descriptions visit our General Information Page.