...and perhaps thank you and this is
something that we could, you know,
experiment with over time, so any
kind of feedback that you can provide us
would really be helpful. You know, are
these useful, are they too long, topic
areas. But this first one that we
want to kick off on is what do we mean
by Community Economic Development? When we kind of went into the next-gen model,
and the Community Development Institute
was developed and the program area
around Community Economic Development was created, there was some
discussion, informal discussion, about
exactly what do we mean by Community
Economic Development. We're kind of
familiar with the phrases "community
development" and "economic development," but what do we mean when we combine these
terms? So what I want to try to do is
kind of give an overview of what we
mean when we talk about Community
Economic Development. So this is going to
be kind of an academic discussion, but
hopefully you can kind of walk away with
a couple of different insights. So again,
what do we mean? Is it community
development, is it economic development,
or is it community economic development?
Well, a lot of it really depends on who
you ask and Phillips and Pittman have
written a very good kind of edited book
on community development economic
development and I've made it available
to folks if they want to have it in
their library. And what they kind of say
is that it depends on if you're
talking to practitioners, or are you talking
about to academics? Practitioners tend to
think of it in terms of outcome, you know
we're trying to achieve a particular
outcome within the community, whereas
practitioners or academics tend to think
of it more as a process and it's this,
you know, we get wrapped up in the
process and we want to make sure that
the process is correct so it's really
kind of not perfectly defined what we
mean here.
Boothroyd and Davis, and if you remember that series of the emails that came around a couple of months ago,
Randy Stoeker suggested that this is the
one that he goes to this Boothroyd and
Davis paper, it's kind of his go-to when he talked
about this, and they kind of break
it up into the individual elements.
Community is really a connection of
interconnected people. And economic
relates to employment and income. Well,
Boothroyd and Davis are sociologists. As
an economist I'm not sure I exactly
accept that it relates to employment and
income I think that's a little bit too
narrow, but we'll get into that.
Development is the betterment or
improved well-being. Okay, what we're
really talking about is is trying to
improve the economic well-being of
people and how do we go about doing that? Let's go into these each one of these
works a little bit more detail. When we
talk about community, you know, 40 or 50
years ago, it was pretty easy to find a
community. I mean people basically worked
in one place. They worked in that place,
they shopped in that place, they went to
church in that place, so the community
was fairly well defined. The problem is,
today people work in one place, they work
in another place, they shop in a third
place, and they don't go to church
anymore.
Matt Kures has been doing some work on
commuting patterns and the amount of
long distance commuting that is going on
now has really been exploding. So this
notion of what do we mean by community is really getting very different. So if we go to the dictionary, right, we go to
Merriam Webster's, and just kind of look at what is the textbook definition: "Can
be unified body of individuals,"
"people with common interests they live in a particular area." Okay this is kind of
what we generally think of when we think
about community. "A group of people with
common characteristics or interests
living together within a larger society."
Okay, yeah. Communities don't live in isolation,
they're part of a network of other
communities. "A body persons of common, or,
especially, professional interests
scattered throughout a larger society." We
can look at the people that are within
the Community Development Institute, the
folks that are on the line, okay, we have
common specifically professional
interests but we're scattered throughout
the whole state of Wisconsin. Indeed, we
can look at some of our colleagues in
Minnesota,
Illinois, Michigan, and it gets even
broader than that, okay. "A body, a person
or nations having a common history or a
common social, economic, or political
interest. Packer fans. How many of you are
Packer fans? I mean, that spreads all over,
it always amazes me. I was at a
conference in Philadelphia where the
Badgers, the men's basketball team,
happened to be playing, and they were
staying in the same hotel, so I was able to
skim some tickets. I have no pride, they
gave them to me, I took them, and so I went, we went to the University of
Pennsylvania to watch the game. There were a lot of Badger fans in the stadium
there. I think there were more Badger
fans and there were Penn fans. So we have
this kind of notion of broader ideas of
what we mean by community. "An interacting
population of various kinds of
individuals in a common location." So
these, all these different kind of
elements, but there are political
interests that define different
community boundaries. A lot of us work
with county governments, a lot of us work
with municipalities, a lot of us, some of
us work with the state, so those
political interests can define community,
okay. Economic interests define different
community boundaries. Here we get to the
idea that, a lot of times, we study what's
the county's economy, what's the
municipality's economy, but those
economic boundaries really are very
fuzzy and they vary by the particular
issue that we're talking about. If we're
talking about, say, recreational housing,
right, you can almost take the State of
Wisconsin and divide it in half. The
eastern half you're talking about a kind
of a Chicago influenced market. The
western part you're talking about a
Twin Cities influenced market. Still
recreational housing but the economics
is a little bit different there. Okay, social interests define different
community boundaries. This is something
that I think is increasingly important
as we're doing more work in the area of
social capital, these kind of connections
people have socially is becoming
increasingly important. We talk about
things like bonding social capital
within the community and bridging social
capital across the community.
These things are becoming increasingly
complex. "Any definition of a community's
boundaries must select those
associations or common interests most
important for the concern to be examined."
What this essentially means is that this
notion of "what is the relevant community"
is going to vary by the topic issue that
you're working on. If you're talking
about water quality issues, its the
watersheds. If you're talking about
childcare issues, it could be a very
different geographic area. If you're
talking about agriculture, it's a
different type of geographic area.
Okay now "Economic." 
Webster: "Of or related to the production, distribution, or
consumption of goods and services." These are basically taken out of good
old-fashioned textbooks. "How does one
allocate scarce resources in order to
maximize well-being?" "It analyzes the cost
and benefits of improving patterns and
resource allocation." And they wonder why
it's called the dismal science.
Essentially what we're saying is that we
really, kind of, as humans, we have kind of
unlimited wants. We always would like to
do a little bit better, but we have
limited resources. There's only so much
time, there's only so much land, there's
only so much resources that are available,
so how do we allocate that in a way to
kind of maximize our well-being? You do
that every time you go to the grocery
store. You decide you want to buy a jar
of mustard. How often do you stand there
and stare at the shelf of mustards
and try to decide which one you want?
You're kind of doing this cost-benefit
analysis in the back of your head, okay.
An economic system. Okay, an economic
system of production, resource allocation,
distribution, it's kind of a geographic
area. So what we're talking about
here is not just simply the question, but
kind of a system that we're set up in, and
there's different ways that we can do
this. There's a capitalist system, there's
a communist system, and then there's a
market-based socialist system. There's
different ways that we can kind of
organize the economy to address this
basic question: how do we allocate
limited resources to make everybody as
happy as we possibly can.
Capitalism generally focuses on private
ownership. That's land and "K" capital,
I own the land, I own my own human
resources, private property rights really
comes into play, and that's how the
market organizes around the decisions
on how I'm going to use the resources
that I own. A socialist system,  is
which a social the society owns the means
of production, and they can be
decided and society makes the
decision of how's labor going to be
allocated, how's capital, going to be
allocated, how are we gonna use land. Now you can break that up into a kind of
a communist system where the
government's making all the decisions or
you can basically say that it's you know
really we're letting the market do it.
What's happening in, say, China, China's
moving from a communist system to more
of a capitalist system, okay. Notions of
private property rights are still pretty
confusing in China, but they're making
that transition and it's a way in which
one goes about making decisions in the
economy. How many of you've seen the
analogy of you have two cows, and to
subscribe capitalism, okay,
traditional capitalism, you have two cows,
you sell one of them, you buy a bull, then
you produce more cows, okay. And a
socialist society you have two cows, you
give one of them to your neighbor. A
communist one, right, the state takes both
of them they give you some milk. You can
kind of work down here to see different
ways in which you can kind of allocate
the resources of your two cows. I
like the Australian one: business seems
pretty good, you close the office, you go
off and have a couple of beers to
celebrate.
There's some other ones here I
didn't put up there. There's the Nazi one,
the government takes the cows and they
shoot you, and you can go on and on. The
idea here is that there's different ways
that you can set up an economic system
in order to kind of allocate resources,
and we tend to be dominated by a
capitalist system. There is no one
system, it's really kind of a blending. We
function under a capitalist market
economy, private property rights and
owners of production, but there's
different ways that we can interpret
that. Essentially it's the rules in the
game.
Hall and Soskice actually did a very nice
paper on how kind of looking at
capitalist, Europe's a capitalist
economy, America is a capitalist economy,
Asia is, Japan is a capitalist economy
but they all function a little bit
differently and they function because
the rules of the game are a little bit
different, and you have those formal
and informal rules. The formal rules are
essentially, what does law allow you
to do? Then you have informal rules,
which is kind of the cultural norms. For
example, in Japan, all right,
when we went through the financial
crisis, right, our banking system was
pretty much able to correct itself
because they were able to call in loans
and whatnot. In Japan, the banking
system is a little bit different. It's
very difficult for a banker in Japan to
call in a loan because it causes the
person who's loan is being called in to
lose face. There was a cultural pressure
not to do that so Japan is burned by all
these bad loans that are floating around
out there.
Cultural differences. The simplest
way to think about it is in terms of the
discount rate. Do you want one hamburger
today or two hamburgers tomorrow? In
America we have a very high discount
rate, we want it, we want it now. Quarterly
reports, are you hitting your
quarterly numbers. A lot of American
corporations, a lot of American companies,
are really based on a very short
timeframe. Europeans have a little bit
more moderate discount rates, they're
looking at five years, five years plus
planning horizons looking out into the
future.
Asia has a lower discount rate, they're
looking at ten years moving into the
future so how do we make decisions today
that will have a payoff ten years in the
future. That's a very different way of
thinking about the economy than the
Americans do. For example in
the auto industry the Japanese in the
1980s decided they wanted to get into
the light truck market and they decided
the best way to do that was to take a
long-term view and they did it by saying
we need to get our foot in the door, and
we need to get our foot in the door and
establish some market share and the way
that we're gonna do that is that we're
gonna sell it below cost. We're
gonna take a loss on every truck that we
sell because then we get our foot in the door. Once we get our foot in the door then we
can start to expand our market share and
we can start to raise prices. How do you
think the Detroit Three responded to
that. Well they're selling at a loss,
they're dumping, that's illegal. No, it's
the different ways in which they think
about the planning horizon. Native
Americans have extremely low discount
rates. They were thinking seven
generations into the future. Decisions
that we make today, how's it going to
affect future generations. I think this
is really important when we think about
community economic development because
when you're looking at the federal level
or you're looking at the state level
you're looking at very very high
discount rates. Why? Because politicians
need to get reelected, they need to do
something that's going to have a splash
and it's going to have an effect right
now, think Foxconn. Local communities,
they have a little bit lower discount
rate, they're thinking about trying to
make this a better place for their
children or their grandchildren. So
the difference, there's a
tension between how the state approaches
economic development and how local
communities approach economic
development. But both in the
capitalist system. Development. I
love it when the dictionary uses the
word to define the word. Development: "the
act or process of developing." Ach, that
doesn't do us much good.
"Growth, progress." Notice they use the term growth here. I want to come back to
that, that's too narrow. Really for our
purposes, what we're trying to do is
we're trying to enhance the quality of
life within the community. We're trying
to make this a better place to live.
Now quality of life, that's a normative
statement, normative in the sense of
we're making a value judgment.
Normative economics speaks to what should be. "I think the income distribution is
too out of whack and we need to do
something to make income more even." Why?
It's a value statement. Positive
economics simply talks about what is,
what will be. For example, a lot of
what we try to do and, say economic
impact assessment, is simply lay out the
pros and the cons. If you do this, we
think this will happen on the positive
side, we think this will happen on the
negative side. You make a decision. A lot
of times as a specialist I'm asked, you
know, "What would you do in this situation?" my immediate response is "I don't live
here, I live in Madison. This is your
decision because normative value
judgments need to come in." As educators, I think our job is really more of a
positive economics in the sense of what
are the pros and cons of the different
strategies, and it's up to the
community to make an individual decision
on what is best for their community. 
So normative is valued laden, positive is
objective. Values vary across individuals
and communities, the practitioner's values
really become secondary to the
community's. There was a while back
when we were thinking about reformulating the mission statement for
Cooperative Extension, and some folks
were arguing that we need to put in
social justice, and there was pushback on
that and the pushback is that social
justice, while we all agree with it as
individuals, it's too value laden and it's
too normative. We need to stay back and
kind of keep this objective. That's one
of the strengths of Extension is that we
are objective. Now you can get into
arguments whether or not people can be
objective or not but we strive to be
objective, we try to stay on that positive
side of the discussion.
Now, growth versus development. These
terms get used interchangeably. When
I teach my my master's level course on
Community Economic Development I always
ask the students on the final exam name
three things that they learn that
surprised them and it's amazing to me how
many respond back that there's a
difference between growth and
development. It's so, to me, it's so
obvious, but to so many folks these two
terms are used interchangeably and
they're not. Growth implies a
quantitative change, development
emphasizes a qualitative improvement.
There's a difference there. Growth means
more of the same, more jobs, more income, more business, more tax base. Development means
using resources to enhance human welfare. How do we change how we're using our
resources to make people better off?
Development can include growth but not
necessarily vice versa. 
Is growth necessary condition for
economic development? Eeehhh...When Dave Marcouiller and I were working with Ron Shaffer
rewriting the textbook, which you should
all have on your shelves now, we would
spend hours, literally, this is the advantage of being a pointy headed academic is that
we can kind of set time aside to have
these kind of discussions. Can you have
development without growth? Shaffer's of
the opinion that, no, development is how
growth, the shape that growth takes. 
And I'm like no, development can be
simply reallocation of the pie without
the pie getting any bigger. So it's
kind of an academic question but it's
one that's kind of useful to reflect on
every now and then. So the
difference, we want more jobs, we want
more business, we want more residents, we want more tax base, any growth is good,
more, more, MORE. When you talk to a
lot of folks and they think about
community economic development, that's
what they're thinking about: jobs,
business, taxes, more people. 
Development on the other hand is we want a quality
of life.
We want economic security, we want
economic opportunities. We want balanced
growth, more of a normative type
thing because we're talking about
quality of life and what's a good
quality of life for me is different than
somebody else. For example, I'm a car
guy, I spend my money on cars. Other
people look at that and say, what a waste.
They spend their money on, say,
travel or something else. Different
people have different tastes and
preferences. What makes them happy, what
improves their quality of life, varies
across people, and that needs to be
taken into consideration when we're
looking at individual communities. So if
your community's adding jobs but the
average earnings per worker are
declining, is that growth or development?
We're adding jobs, but they're kind
of crappy jobs. Is that good or bad? Well,
depends on who you ask. If you're
working with a local Chamber of Commerce 
to provide more effective mentoring
services to new local small business
owners, is that growth or development?
Is that community development or is that
economic development? If you
create and run a Badgerville Leadership
Program, is that growth or development?
It's kind of saying we're trying to
pigeonhole these things when sometimes
we don't need to pigeonhole them. That's
one of the reasons that Shaffer, Ron
Shaffer, was so keen to kind of think in
terms of Community Economic Development
because it's a more comprehensive way of
thinking about things
than simply pigeonholing it in terms of
one of the other two. Series of
definitions here. Now, these are all
academics because academics get paid to
do this kind of work. Anna
Haynes and Gary Green this is their, how
many of you got their textbook? You
should have their textbook it's
asset mapping, it's a good
book to have on your shelf, it's a
demographic, it's an effort
to build assets that increases the
capacity of residents to improve the
quality of life in their locality.
Cawley, a deliberate demographic,
[democratic], god, I can't say that word,
why can't I say that word, I'm going to
skip it, development activity focusing on
existing resources, economic... I'm not
going to read each one of these. What I'm
gonna do is I'm just gonna kind of page
through these quickly. An educational
approach, increase awareness, increase the confidence and abilities to identify and tackle
their own problems. Community
improvements which take place over time.
Groups of people.
The process of local decision-making, the
development of programs. Notice that 
the idea on process here about
identifying and harnessing local
community resources and opportunities
stimulating sustainable economic
educational process, group
decision-making, group action. Plock:
the active voluntary
involvement in a process to improve some
identifiable aspect to community life.
Ken Wilkinson: acts by people that open
and maintain channels of communication and cooperation among... eeehhh that's...
Trying to build networks. Comprehensive,
wide-ranging program of activities,
overall improvement, locality is a place
to live and work.
Helping community people analyze their
problems.
Community economic development is
practiced, the general objective is the
same: to take some measure of control of
the local economy back, as Boothroyd adn
Davis, that sounds pretty Marxist to me.
Perry: involve a comprehensive
wide-ranging program of activities,
overall improvement of localities, a
place to live and work. Ron: the creation
and implementation of strategies to
promote the economic well-being of
community. And of course the correct one
is the process of identifying and
analyzing economic issues and the
creation and implementation of a set of
specific policies aimed at enhancing
economic opportunities of community
residents. So what are
some of the common themes here? It is a
process as opposed to putting out fires.
It has to be proactive. Now, this
gets into a situation, is, what do you do
when you've got a community that's fairly
apathetic?
Gary green and I had a long conversation
coming back from a meeting and we kind
of debated the ethics. The community's apathetic. Is it ethical to create a false
crisis, a fire, to get people reacting? Is
that ethical? Yeah, yeah, okay, citizen
involvement, citizen solutions, this is
bottom-up, this is not top-down.
Educational: we're building capacity.
Vitality, betterment, quality of life,
placemaking: We have a placemaking team
that is really kind of aimed at doing
this very thing. Economic
opportunities. Change. These are some of
the common themes that are running
throughout.
So Community Development traditionally
thought about building community assets,
building community institutions, building
community capacity, those are all things
that I think we feel fairly comfortable
with. Economic development is building
economic opportunity, enhancing economic well-being. It's more than simply
creating more jobs, it's more than simply
creating more businesses. What we're
trying to do is to require to create
economic opportunities so that people
have choices.
Community economic development is
really balancing economic development
with social, cultural, and environmental
desires. Essentially community economic
development is moving back and forth
across the spectrum. Indeed what we're
thinking is maybe a triple bottom-line
type of approach. We have economic issues, we have community related issues, and
then we have environmental issues, and
ideally what we want is to kind of work
on the overlap between those things. Now
sometimes we're going to be sliding one
way or the other a little bit more
depending on the community and depending
on the particular issue that we're
working on, but we're always trying to
zero in on that overlap there, and
we're not pigeon-holed on one side or
the other side. Are all communities
ready for economic development? No
they're not. 
Economic development within a
community presumes that there's certain
local institutions that are in place: you
have effective leadership, you have
citizen participation, you have
viable local business organizations,
among other things. Economic
development kind of presumes that
there's a certain level of community
development that is in place. Now, a lot
of the communities that we work with,
they don't have these things, they're not
ready for economic development. So
for example that Badgerville Leadership
Program, the motivation for that might be
economic development, but that's really
kind of a form of community development,
because what we're trying to do is to
build that leadership, we're trying to
build that labor or citizen
participation. In the strictest
sense, Community Development is a necessary
but not sufficient condition for
economic development. You've got to have
it in place before you can tackle
economic development. That's why I think
that, Extension, we kind of slide back and
forth on these issues because we
come into a community thinking economic
development, economic issues but really
what we do is we end up, I don't want to
say backsliding, but moving towards more
"No, we need to get our, kind of, we need to
get our ducks in a row here" before we
can tackle these economic issues.
Asset-building. This is Gary and
Anna's book, it is kind of asset building
the skills, the capacity, of individuals,
associations and institutions within the
locality, lay the foundation upon which
economic development is built. The
classic example that I like to use is
kind of a Chamber of Commerce. Does the
community have a Chamber of Commerce? Why should a community have a Chamber of
Commerce? Well yeah we have a
Chamber of Commerce. Oh, cool, what do they do?
Well, they organize the 4th of July
parade. Well what else are they doing? Ope,
that's it. Okay that community needs to
kind of focus on community development,
of building that institution with the
end goal of better positioning it for
economic development. So the key
here is what's the interest in economic
development, community economic
development? Is there organization?
So, are people interested in this?
What are the organizations that are in
place to do this? This is the capacity
building. Do we have a Chamber of
Commerce? Do we have a functioning local
government? Gary and I were involved
with a project that Norm Walzer, who
some of you know, on kind of the state of
the art of these community visioning
programs that would be kind of, Gary and
I were talking in terms of the Community
Economic Analysis program, and we had
representatives from 10 different states
around the Midwest where all the
universities have these various kind of
community visioning programs, and
the groups were all fairly consistent in
terms of how we approached things.
Every state did it a little bit differently,
until we got to the notion of success.
How do you define if your program is
successful or not? And that's where we
all kind of couldn't agree. And the
example that one person gave that really
stuck out to me is that they had a
meeting in a community where they
actually, the meeting ended and they
didn't have to call the Sheriff's
Department.
That's how dysfunctional that community
was, they couldn't even get the same room
together without fights breaking out. For
that community to actually have a town
meeting and not have fights break out,
that was an extremely successful
enterprise for this particular person.
Is that community ready to
undertake economic development? No, not
even close. So a lot of times the
interest is there, the organization is
not there, so we need to work on that.
If the organization is there then
we have knowledge, information, data. What's the latest research say on this?
What's the data say about the strengths
and weaknesses in the local economy?
What's the data say about the housing
market? Bring that information in
and then, with that information, then you
can actually identify specific
strategies, actions, and plans.
Effective community economic development
kind of is this process that we go through
and at each time we're moving backwards,
we're going back and we're
re-evaluating and we're re-evaluating.
Now this is where we get into this
discussion about the balance between
process and content, and as an economist
I'd like to see more content, but we
spend a lot of time worrying about the
process.
And I think this is something that we as
an institution or as the Community
Development Institution is kind of to
think about this balance between the
process skills that we have and the
content skills that we have, and I think
that this is something that, moving
forward, we need to spend a little bit
more time thinking about is what is that
proper balance and what should that
content look like.
In the end, now, this is my "What we're
trying to do is that we're trying to
help communities make form, more informed
decisions." That's really our end goal.
We're trying to educate them by bringing
research to the table. That research is
based on our current understanding of
what the economics says, what the
sociology says, what the political science says. What is their current
state-of-the-art understanding of the
issues? What's the research say?
We're bringing that information to the
table. We're helping kind of teach
Econ 101 in terms of economic
development, and then we're helping them
make the decision, and we're trying
not to impose our opinions but rather
the community's opinions in terms of how
they want to take this information and
how they want to move forward. It's
really up to the individual communities.
So, in summary, community development is
building community assets. What are
the institutions? What do we have?
Economic development is creating
economic opportunities. Community
economic development is the blending of
the two by recognizing that economic
development is impossible without a
solid community development foundation.
Those two kind of go hand-in-hand.
They're not separate, they're kind of
together.
Development and growth are not
synonymous. Development focuses on
notions of quality of life, 
broadly defined. I think this is where
this kind of long-term thinking, that
kind of discount rate that I was
talking about before, at the state, the
political pressures to do something and
do something now, they're focused on
growth. How many jobs do we create, how
many businesses do we create?
Whereas at the local level, I think
they're more interested in kind of you
know longer term what can we do today to
make this a better place for our
children and our grandchildren? And
part of that is economic development. If
boomerang migration, for example, if we
encourage our kids to go off to college
go off to the University go out and
experience life and then when you're in
your you know mid-30s or late 30s
whatever and you're ready to kind of you
know settle down, move on back to the
community, well what's gonna draw
them back? Part of that is going to be
economic opportunities, so it's kind
of hand-in-glove here in terms of
how we move about this stuff.
Practitioners must take care to
distinguish between normative and
positive economics. It's really difficult.
We got to make sure that we're not
imposing our world beliefs on the
communities that we work with. The
outcome is supposed to reflect the values,
the norms, of the community and not the
practitioner. It's really truly an
interdisciplinary study. Suppose for
example that the community is wanting to
tackle poverty. That's an issue that the
community decides they want to do.
As an economist, I'm going to come at
this from a point of view of economics
and the way that economics might think
about it is in terms of labor markets.
Poverty is a function of wages and wages
is a reflection of labor productivity
and the demand for skills, so an
economist might think about it in terms
of, you know, labor markets and education
and things like that and the types of
jobs that are being created. It goes
back to that example. The community's
generating a lot of jobs, but they're not
very well
paying jobs. That's an economic
question. If you talk to a political
scientist, what might they say? Well, as
political access, who has access to
the political decision-makers? I mean
this is a big hot discussion nationally.
You know, when Citizens United was 
judged on by the Supreme Court there was a
big discussion here in terms of, you know,
well, what influence is that going to
have on access to the decision-makers?
Who did the policymakers listen to?
That's political access. Poor people
don't have access. Education: if
you're coming in from the point of view
of an educator, you're gonna think about
school quality. If you think about it
from the point of view of sociologists,
cultural influence, those informal rules that
dictate. Now the question is,
which one is right? Well, as an
economist I'd like to say that the
economists are right, but in reality
they're all right. This is why
community economic development is really
trying to take a systems approach to
thinking about the community. It's not
just one piece of the puzzle, but it's
all the pieces to the puzzle that need
to be brought into play, and each one of
these different disciplines brings a
different insight into how we think
about the problem. Now, I think that's
what makes the work in community
economic development so much fun is that
we spend a lot of time thinking about
well, how would a sociologist answer this
question, how would a political scientist
answer this question, how would 
somebody from an education background
answer this question, and the way that
these different disciplines think about
their answers you get finer and finer
insights into what's the underlying
problem. So really community economic
development is really very much of an
interdisciplinary perspective. And with
that I'm going to stop because I wanted
to leave time for questions or comments
Kristin you can wake up now.
No, that was great Steve thank you so
much. So two ways you can ask a question:
you can unmute your microphone in the
lower left hand corner of your screen
and just ask away or if you would prefer
you can put it
in the chat and I'll voice your question
for you whichever you prefer. Or if you
have comments, too, not just questions,
comments, experiences you'd like to share.
Too academic?
I'll shoot if no one else
will. Steve, thank you so much. Can you hear me?
Yes
well thank you very very much.
I was intrigued by that little portion where
we talk about content and process and
you know how we as educators think about
our work and maybe you know certain
people having a preference for focusing
on content I guess can you clarify kind
of how that fits in with our discussion
of community economic development and
how it's done?
Yes oftentimes when we
think about process, we're really
thinking about, you know, who's at the
table, how to restructure the meeting, how
do we do facilitation, how do we kind of
get these folks around the table talking,
how do we get them to kind of move to
the next level and make that decision
and implement those decisions. Those are
a lot of process. Boring, isn't it? The content is
kind of how do we interject new
information? How do we interject what is
the current thinking on the particular
issue that they're dealing with? So
for example with Foxconn you could place
say two different roles. One role is
simply facilitating and getting all the
local governments kind of at the table
together and talking about issues and
simply saying "Okay, this thing is coming,
and how are we going to address it? How
are we going to work on it? How are we
going to move forward so that this turns
into a win-win situation?" That's the
process. How do we have those
conversations? How do we make those
decisions? The content really is kind of
interjecting what do we know? What don't
we know? And in terms of kind of 
saying, you know,
I spent a lot of time, you know, diffusing
the fact that the multiplier is not
eight the multiplier is more like 1.5.
Well, why? Well because we've done the
research. The labor market, there's going to be a
lot of people being drawn in from the
Chicago market. Why? Because the commuting
sheds are such. So it's kind of that
interjecting information and that
information is research-based so it's a
balance between the two. I think
that simply saying, "Okay, we're gonna do a
detailed technical report and we're gonna
dump the report on you and here's what
all the data says there you go have fun
with it." That's a mistake.
That's not our job. Our job is to
help kind of formulate what the
questions are to help bring that
information to the table and kind of
help them process that information and
make a decision. So it's that
balance between the two. In some
situations it's going to be more
process-oriented,
in other situations gonna be more
content oriented. Depends on where
the community is. Does that help? Or can
you kind of give me your
impression what the balance is?
Yeah I would agree that those two are, like,
married. You're going back and forth and
it's a natural, kind of, tension, you know.
I look at it as, like, maybe a little bit
different but in the sense of, like, a
technical challenge that we know the
data, we know what this looks like, we
know it's not a simple solution, but if
there is a solution that's worked
elsewhere and then there's adaptive
challenges that are so relational and so
hard to navigate and there's no tested
model, you're feeling around in the dark.
It's iterative and I like that even more
than process - content because it it just
acknowledges that there's so much that
we can't know about human people,
learning, and group dynamics and all of
that. So yeah it's interesting to hear
some of these notions and how they --
You're right, the complexity of it.
We just had someone from the University
of Chicago come in and give a seminar
in the department yesterday and was talking about, in Chicago, and it was gang violence,
killings, murder rate, and how the police
department is trying different
strategies, and my god what a mess. You
know, the theory says this, the data says
something different, and it's like, you
know, it's so complex, it's so messy
that you can only, you know, there is no
clean answer to a lot of these, and what
work,s and it turns out what worked in
the south side of Chicago is not working
on the west side of Chicago. Why? You gotta get sociologists at the table,
you gotta get political scientists at the
table. They'll help you to understand why. Why it
worked in the south side but not on the
west side. You're right, it's messy, it's really messy.
We had a comment from one
of our participants that sociologists
take a holistic approach to poverty, 
to look at poverty for societal
influences, so echoing what you're saying.
Yeah, if this is of, you know, if these
webinars are of interest to you another
one that's kind of on the back burner is
is a webinar on kind of systems thinking
approaches to community economic
development and it's kind of the 
Flores community capitals and the
Shaffer star, and how you can kind of go
about thinking about, you know, holistic
ways. The problem with holistic ways is
that, after World War II, economic
development, community economic
development, has really focused pretty
much on manufacturing recruitment, and
then in the 1960s and 70s it became much
more holistic because that's when the
civil rights movement came up, the
environmental movement came up, and, 
you know, people start taking this holistic
approach. And then in the 80s and 90s we
went back. We kind of moved away from
that holistic approach because it was
simply too, it was too cumbersome. There
was too much, too many moving parts. You
couldn't get your head around it and it
just become, it became frustrating, so
people kind of stepped back and said
"Okay, we're just gonna
focus on one angle here." Now, with
advances in system thinking, we're kind
of going back and saying "We need to take
a more holistic approach with the
systems thinking approach. It's still
complex, it's still very complicated, but
it kind of gives us a better way to
do this holistic approach."
We did have a
question from a participant that was
wondering if some of these models that
you have have been applied in real life
and if you could maybe give examples and
maybe talk a little bit about different
roles, responsibilities, or even
milestones to the community economic
development approach that you've been outlining.
Specific examples
Okay, let me give you one
example. Buffalo County, frac sand mining.
Came in, the community was really
split. The community
of Buffalo County was not prepared to handle
this. It had been a very sleepy county,
very rural county, not a very proactive
county, and then all of a sudden frac
sand mining hit and the community blew up. 
You basically had half the community that
was like, "This is fast money, we need to
do it," and the other half of the community's
like "Hey, we just moved here to have this
idealistic farmette in a
beautiful valley, and we're not going to
risk it." And we started a process, and the
process was really to try to help with, let's
take a step back and think about what's
happening to the local economy.
Where is the local economy? Where has it been?
Where is it going? What are the strengths
and weaknesses? What are the trends? And
then think about it. And the more we did
these kind of meetings and kind of
progress down this path, kind of, 
those kind of fights kind of dissipated
and cooler heads started to prevail and
what it really turned out to be is there
was concern about truck traffic. There
was concern about the sand trucks going
24/7 and disrupting the quality of life
in the community. So it was like, okay, how
can we kind of, we can, THAT we can deal
with, that we can
get our head around, that we can work
with, and so they were able to kind of
tackle that. Now, what's come out of that
is that Buffalo County has come to a
realization that they need to be a
little bit more proactive so now they're
working on developing a Community
Development Corporation. They've been
working on, you know, partnering with some of
the neighboring counties, but it's very
very slow, it's a very very slow movement.
Another example is up in the Fox Cities
area. Dave Mensch, some of you remember
Dave Mensch. The Chamber of Commerce up
there approached Dave about doing some
industry targeting. They had some
marketing money left over and they wanted to
do some advertising in the Chicagoland,
they want to know what industry trade
magazine to advertise in. And we
basically said, well, we don't really do
that, but what we can do is kind of this
other kind of gap and disconnect
analysis and try to find out what are
the strengths and weaknesses of the local economy? What are some
potential targeted industries that you
can think about? And we went through that
process and it was an extremely
successful process to the extent that
other neighboring counties wanted to get
involved, and the workforce development
board that was in that region kind of
took leadership and, next thing you know,
we had 14 counties involved. It got too
big too fast, but what came out of that
were two things. One is NEW North was
developed out of that because they
realized they needed to take a regional
approach, and NEW North kind of came out
of that process. The other thing that
came out of that process is that one of
the industries that we identified as a
gap was engineering services, and so
what's happened over time is the
technical schools up there are now
investing in engineering programs. UW-Oshkosh and UW-Green Bay are now doing a
pre-engineering program. They partner
with the engineering school here down in
Madison to kind of do the first couple
of years in Oshkosh and Green Bay, then you
can complete your degree here.
So you had local institutions of higher
education start to invest in an
engineering program because it was
identified in that study, so you you can
go back and you can point to specific
examples of where, kind of, a you know,
addressing a particular issue kind
of opened up new ideas in terms of ways
of how the community's thinking about doing things.
So here's a follow-up question. So when you're
looking at from your perspective as a
statewide specialist and a faculty
member at Madison getting involved in
those programs, the on-ramp is typically
through the County educator, is it
through regional planning commissions,
is it all of the above?
Well I think that's, and I'm glad
Brandon's on the call because I think
this is something that we need to think
about. Historically, if there was not a
CNRD educator, a specialist would not
be involved I got involved in Buffalo
County because Carl Dooley kind of wears
both hats. I kind of poke fun at Carl too
he's more of a CNRD educator than he
is an Ag educator and he fights that
back tooth and nail, but lo and behold he
does a lot of community development work. 
So, historically, if there isn't, if the
county educator is not involved, then the
specialist doesn't come in. That was the
historical way. I'm not sure as we build
out and build new partners if that's, how
much of that kind of tradition is going
to carry forward into the future, but
historically, if the County educator is
not involved in it, I tend not to get involved.
Yeah, and Steve, this is Brandon.
I think that we, because of the Wisconsin
idea, I think we still want to make sure
that we are delivering to improve the
quality of life for all people in the
State of Wisconsin, but we do, with that
said, there's sort of this asterisk that
says that, if there are community or
county educators on the ground,
that's sort of the priority place. It's
not that we won't go into these other
areas, but there is, the priority is
given to those other places. I do think
there's just an example of Adams County,
which doesn't currently have a community
development educator, but we are doing
some work there. Kristen's helping along
with some others. And it is goodwill that
we're actually putting forward. And the
hope is that, you know, maybe we could
have someone there at some point, but I
think there is sort of a, I don't want to say
two-tiered system, but it is, the
expectation is, we will certainly be
there to assist educators on the ground
in the counties they're located, and then,
but we still will give time and effort
towards these others, but we do have some
self preservation that is necessary just
to make sure that people aren't overburdened.
I think that's a fair
assessment. I've been asked by the
Rural Hospitals Association to do some
work with the hospitals in different
counties and some of the counties have
educators, some of them Community
Development Institute educators, some of
them do not and it's always, I give,
whether it's the department chair, the
department head, whatever you're called
and/or you know the youth development,
educator the family living educator, or
whatever we're calling them now, kind of
a heads up, and say I really like you to
be involved in this but you don't feel
obligated that you have to be involved
in this, so it's kind of a professional
courtesy. But you're right, I mean, if
there's only so many hours in the day,
and I would prefer to be working with
with an Amy than in a County where there
is no CDI educator.
Steve this is Brian. Just the editorial comment, when we
talk about counties let's not forget
that we do have tribal sovereign nations
that are involved in this situation,
too, when we're talking about this. And
then the other thing is, were you going
to send your presentation out?
I can. I can also post it on, some of you know of
that kind of online course that I put
together, I can post it there, I can
email it out, it's not that big of a file
I'll email it out and I'll post it on there.
Kristen do we have any plans to
archive these
Yeah, and thank you Brian for bringing that up, because it's on my list and I would certainly have
forgotten if you haven't said it right
now
so I will be sending out an email
link to the recording of this for the
CDI Institute once it is is up and
running that takes typically a day or
two for this video link to go up. We will
have a sub page on the EDA University
Center web page that will have all of
this material archived and our intern is
working on getting that up and running
this week so I should be able to have a
link for that, but in between now and
then, if anybody wants a copy, I will
certainly be more than happy to
circulate a PDF among the participants here.
Any way we can get the material in your hand
Then what were the dates for the next webinars?
I'm glad you said that, let me share my screen here
and they will be coming up I'm going to
try to talk and are you seeing a screen
right now that has a...
fantastic. So our next one is February
5th at 12 o'clock noon. Same link that
you used today will get you to that one
as well, and Tessa Conroy is holding that. It'll
be a panel discussion, actually I'm very
excited about it, getting access to
childcare. Why, how, and who to work with.
That's been in a really salient and
timely topic in a lot of the communities
that we've been working with this past
year. And then in March it'll be a
discussion on polarizing press. How media use
affects our evaluation of the state and
local economy, and we expect within the
next couple of weeks to have April May
and June scheduled as well. We don't know
the topics, we do know that they will be
the first business Wednesday of every
month, so for example this first
Wednesday of 2020 actually was New
Year's Day, so our first business
Wednesday is today, the 8th. But those, as soon
as they become available, I'll make sure
to send them out and we do hope to see
everyone on. If you have a suggestion for
a topic or something you'd like to see
covered, please just let me know and
we'll do our best to schedule
some information and some research
along those lines as well.
The other thing, just because we only got a couple
minutes left, is in terms of interest to
you, we were also thinking maybe do these
more frequently but make them shorter,
like 15-minute podcasts and, you know,
would that be of interest? These longer,
we'll kind of call them brown-bag lunches 
be of interest? What's your
preference? Because I know that kind of
the other program areas, I'm sticking
with the old program areas. The Ag
program area does a pretty good job of
using these webinars to do professional
development and CNRD historically has
not and we're trying to we're trying to
change that. So the idea really here is,
you know, how can we best use this
technology to help you? So any ideas that
you've got we'd love to hear it.
And one thing I'd like to add to I just
got an email from a participant who is
not part of Extension if you don't mind
getting these emails, just type, or 
you'd like to get these emails, just
type your email information into the
group chat and I'll make sure that
you're added to the list.
Yes, and that's
another good thing, when we first did
this we were thinking just internal to
the Community Development Institute. Do
we want to go bigger?
We are bigger, yeah.
We've got quite a few of our partners on today.
Oh we do?
We do, yes. Surprise!
Surprise surprise! Because I
made that pretty academic, considering we're all
University of Wisconsin employees. But
you know kind of feedback in terms of
what you'd like to see would really be
helpful.
Any other? We've got just a couple more--actually we're at the hour, but if those of you that want to leave
or have to go, we will see you next time
hopefully. If anyone has an extra
question or two and would like to stick
around past our official ending time of
one o'clock you're welcome to do so and
I think Steve would
probably take another question or so, if
anyone has anything. Otherwise, we thank
you very much for participating today,
and we look forward to seeing you next
month on the fifth.
Thank you all, keep
warm!
Kristin, did you want to stay on for a second?
Yeah let's stay on for a second or two more. I'm not sure we don't have anyone asking...
I want to make sure Myles logs off because I don't want him listening in
[Laughter]
I was up in Myles' neck the woods a couple days ago, it was beautiful up there, yeah.
It is pretty up there.
All right
All right
And I think UWEX chip is still on the
line too
All right. Should I give you a call?
They left, okay, there we go
Wait, I'm gonna stop the recording, too.
Okay
