Community Survivors II

On Monday I was in Vancouver, WA, a magnificent community right across the river from Portland, Oregon for Maury Forman’s Community Survivors II program for communities and economic developers in the Northwest. It was a great program with talks on developing young entrepreneurs; utilizing your environmental advantage (a new subject for me); TechRanch in Bozeman, MT (one of my booming agurbs® that Rich Karlgaard has also written a great deal about); the importance of education and demographics and much more. Maury has one of the most innovative approaches to economic development education that I have seen.

I ran into friends from Colville, WA at the conference. Colville is one of my top 100 agurbs® that I visited last summer. I was pleased to learn that they had combined their chamber and downtown associations that previously had been fighting each other, into one organization. A small agurb® like Colville is WAY too small to have infighting going on like that and I counseled them when I was there to try to get everyone “onto the same page” and to reach out to other small towns. They are doing both.

The Dalles, OR, also one of the towns I visited last summer had big news to announce. They recently were selected by Google as the location for a new “server farm” that will initially hire 100 people. They are a town poised for great things.