HTC: Phase I Ended

Back in March, I posted about Greene County becoming one of nine pilot communities within the State of Indiana for the Home Town Competitiveness program. http://gcdailyworld.com/blogs/chriswathe...

Yesterday, the Steering Committee travelled to Bedford to celebrate the end to Phase I of the program, the "assessment phase," with the other pilot communities involved. This included exchanging ideas, stories, and solutions to common issues. It also involved an afternoon address by Lt. Governor Becky Skillman, who has continued to be very excited about this initiative to revitalize Indiana's rural communities.

During this all-day event, the Greene County group was reminded again and again by the other communities present that our problems share many similarities with their community's problems. Retaining youth, supporting entrepreneurship, developing "community chests" for re-investment into the community, and developing new leaders is challenging not only for those of us in Greene County, but also other counties and communities within our state. And those issues are very similar to communities even in Nebraska, where the HTC program originated, as we had a representative from Nebraska's program explain to the group earlier in the day.

An interesting analogy was given about hometowns, their youth, and baseball, too, which I'd like to share:

The speaker explained that in baseball you send a batter to the box after much training and conditioning. The batter's box is a confined area, and balls get hurled at the batter at great speeds. The batter's first goal, of course, is to hit the ball and advance to first base. When the batter arrives at first base, there is a coach there to advise the batter. When the second batter comes to bat, it's this batter's main goal to advance the first batter to second base. When arriving at second base, the first batter is furthest from where he started at -- from home -- and has no coach beside him. He then tries to advance to third base, where another coach is there to ultimately guide him back to home.

A small town's youth is a lot like those batters, he went on to explain. The confined area of the batter's box may have the same feel of a hometown to an 18 year old. They get trained and conditioned at home to go out in the world and have a lot of things hurled at them. They may go on to college, a technical school, or into the trades, where they may be furthest from home (2nd base). From that vantage point, they gain new perspective and have a different view from where they once were at home. Along the way, they will hopefully be guided by coaches, family, and mentors. And ultimately, they'll return home to help the team (our community) to become winners.

I thought that was a good analogy and worth sharing.

There was even a new acronym that entered my vocabulary yesterday: "C.A.V.E." people. No, these people do not live in dark, damp holes in the ground, but it's an acronym for "Citizens Against Virtually Everything". Boy, how true! There seems to be a few of these in each community, and although I've had the general concept of these small groups or people identified for many years, I'm glad to finally have an official label for them.

Another one-liner I thought summed things up well for smaller communities was this: rural economic development is like hand-to-hand combat, not about dropping big bombs. I think this goes back to an earlier blog post I had in mid-January http://gcdailyworld.com/blogs/chriswathe...

It seems best for economic development to maintain what they have, as a first priority. Not losing the businesses they have already helps to build a firm foundation to launch and develop additional businesses, which is a close second in priority.

As we move into Phase II of the HTC process, I think you'll see how this initiative will begin uniting people, increasing enthusiasm, engaging youth, introducing new ideas, starting discussions, and involving new people. It already has.

It might be useful when you attend or participate in HTC events, such as the recent Opportunity Retreat http://gcdailyworld.com/blogs/chriswathen/entry/18972/ , to look around the crowd and identify who is NOT there but SHOULD BE. A simple invitation may be all that's needed to get that person there.

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This blog post by Chris Wathen was also published in his Linton, Indiana based Greene County Daily World blog entitled, “Riddle Me This”.