The Olds Institute For Community and Regional Development and the Town of Olds hosted part 2 of a Business Vitality Initiative on Wednesday, refining a process that was started in April.
Mike Stolte, executive director of the Centre of Innovative and Entrepreneurial Leadership, who led both the sessions, said the aim of the session last week – which about 40 people attended – was to pick two or three short-term actions that people can work on and to report back to the community from ideas generated in April.
The community was able to secure $10,000 to go toward working on three main priorities to improve the business friendliness of the community. One of them was to recruit 25- to 34 year-olds, another was to create some type of cultural event similar to the farmers' market that would create networks and markets and the third was a buy-local project.
“Those are three things that people really felt one, were really important in Olds, and two, that they really wanted to put time and energy into,” he said.
Three action teams will now report back to the group at a later date on their progress on the action items.
“It's going to depend upon what the groups recommend. They could say,‘this is too much for us. We can't move forward on this or this is something we're going to meet two more times on and try and get a process launched,'” he said.
Stolte said his company has had more than a 90 per cent success rate in getting communities it has worked with to move forward on the three actions within a year of identifying them.
Stolte said the entire idea is to create a document that people can follow up on.
“This can also become a foundational document for sound economic development planning. It's a process that helps improve the business friendliness of communities that we've (worked with),” he said, adding that Olds has scored among the top communities the company has worked with.
“It's doing well, but there's always stuff that can be done. What this is showing is a commitment to improve an already good business climate,” he said.
