Western Carolina University Receives $362K Economic Development Grant
Date Posted: 1/12/2007
For further info contact:
Hillary Sherman (828) 227-3444
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CULLOWHEE – The Institute for the Economy and the Future at Western Carolina University is the recipient of a $362,060 grant from the U.S. Economic Development Administration to develop a training program to assist local officials in adopting a more regional approach to economic development strategies.
The grant will support the IEF’s Regionalism and Clusters for Local Development Project, an initiative designed to create a curriculum to help development practitioners across the nation, and particularly in rural areas, more effectively apply the core concepts of regional economic development.
“The increasing mobility of labor, production, capital and knowledge, and the shift toward a service-based economy driven by innovation mean local development initiatives no longer stop at county or state lines,” said Hillary Sherman of the IEF.
The EDA-funded project is designed to develop a curriculum that will assist economic development practitioners, workforce development specialists and education planners in understanding and promoting initiatives that are truly regional in scope, Sherman said.
The project brings together some of the nation’s foremost experts in regionalism and clustering, including Edward Feser, a prominent clustering and local economic development expert; Arnold Packer, renowned workforce development expert and co-author of the U.S. Department of Labor’s SCANS Workforce 2000 Development Report; and John Bardo, WCU’s chancellor and author of a forthcoming manuscript about economic development and education policy. Also collaborating in the project are the Regional Economics Applications Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and ACCRA – The Council for Community and Economic Research.
The one-year project includes a needs assessment of existing knowledge of regionalism and cluster development; development of a training curriculum; and the dissemination of the curricula through conferences, open-source interactive resources, CDs and DVDs, the Internet and printed materials.
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D. Samuel Neill
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