Five counties' Prosperity Summits strengthen local economic prospects

This spring, NACo partnered with the Ford Foundation and leading economic development experts from the WealthWorks community of practice to hold a series of County Prosperity Sum­mits in rural and mid-sized coun­ties across the country.

The County Prosperity Sum­mits were based on the Wealth­Works framework, an approach to economic development that has evolved via a partnership among the Ford Foundation, the Center for Rural Entrepreneurship, the Aspen Institute, Yellow Wood Associates and other leaders that now form an integrated network of national and regional partners working in this field (full list avail­able at www.WealthWorks.org).

The WealthWorks frame­work promotes an approach to economic development that links a community’s assets to meet market demand in ways that build lasting livelihoods. Essentially, this approach seeks to build and retain wealth locally, in which all partners of an economic system, from producer to consumer, are engaged in a mutually supportive set of relationships.

NACo launched the County Prosperity Summits program in fall 2014, inviting small and mid-sized counties (with a population of less than 200,000) to apply to hold a one-day summit in their county with support from NACo.

Five counties were selected: Shasta County, Calif.; Scott County, Ky.; Cape May County, N.J.; Cheatham County, Tenn.; and Titus County, Texas.

Each summit involved approxi­mately 50 participants invited by the host county, representing a broad mixture of county elected officials and staff, other local and regional public officials, business owners and representatives of the nonprofit and philanthropic community.

NACo worked with each se­lected county to develop an agenda tailored to a specific emerging economic sector, or several sectors, identified by the county as holding potential for growth and resonance with the WealthWorks approach. Each event was facilitated by economic development experts: Deb Markley, co-founder and managing director of the Center for Rural Entrepreneurship, and Barbara Wyckoff, CEO of Dynamica Consulting, traded off this duty. Markley and Wyckoff also acted as project advisors throughout the process. The facilitators were accompanied by a “storyteller”— an economic development practitioner with hands-on experience in cultivating complex, sustainable partnerships at the local or regional level. The storyteller’s role was to add local context and describe how the WealthWorks framework looks in a real community.

After learning about the WealthWorks framework and hearing its application in lo­cal communities, summit par­ticipants quickly got to work. Grouped into multidisciplinary teams to foster new networking and collaboration potential, participants worked through a series of exercises to diagram their community’s existing and underutilized assets and identify opportunities to strengthen spe­cific sectors at hand.

Check out summit materials

All materials from the summits, as well as detailed summaries of each event, are available online at www.naco.org/prosperity. Additionally, NACo has launched a Digital Journal to docu­ment and share the lessons of each county summit.

The team-based exercises culminated in the construction of sector-specific “value chains.” Value chains refer to networks of people, businesses, organizations and agencies that work together to address a specific market for a type of product or service — be it locally grown fruit, regionally pro­duced craft beer or heritage-based tourism activities. The difference between a value chain and a typi­cal supply chain is that partners in a value chain, while still advancing self-interest, are collaborating in a system that will bring multiple types of local and regional wealth to a community. Think of it as a venture undertaken by a group of investors: Each is looking to generate a good return on invest­ment, but they are also motivated by social, political, environmental or other types of co-benefits that build on each other and can be reinvested. For example, Scott County leaders developed a value chain for a multi-use trail system that not only identified various end users (also known as demand partners) — such as school groups, tourists and property owners — but also pinpointed the existing infrastructure, businesses, natural resources and other local assets that would benefit from the trail system.

At each summit, teams charted out new value chains in a diverse set of local sectors, including agriculture, tourism, unmanned aircraft systems and value-added products such as locally produced wine and beer.

To sustain future activities, county summit participants set goals for post-summit implemen­tation. While all of their goals look different, common themes included strategies to identify and engage traditionally under­represented populations of the community that did not attend the summit, developing task forces to take ownership of the process and build on the summit’s momentum, and exploring new value chains for other industries in the county. To sustain the progress made at each event, NACo will provide follow-up support to each county.

One of the most important outcomes of each summit was its ability to convene diverse groups of stakeholders who perhaps hadn’t interacted before or never discussed local economic issues in this context. In New Jersey, Cape May County Freeholder Will Morey noted, “What I took away from this summit is the number of relationships that exist in the county. I really feel we can now have better conversations when it comes to our industries, as well as social services and how deepen­ing economic development will support those needs and business goals. We need to look at all of the collateral benefits — within the community and outside the community — to appeal to various partners’ needs.”

Another recurring theme was the importance of building thriv­ing industries not only to address economic challenges but also to more efficiently utilize the exist­ing natural, cultural and social assets. As Cheatham County, Tenn. Mayor David McCullough said, “The NACo County Prosper­ity Summit served the important purpose of enhancing our local and regional leaders’ capacity to develop creative economic and community development solu­tions. We are also excited about building on our existing assets to achieve successes in implementing the recommended practices laid out in the Cheatham County tourism plan.”