THE ISSUE: A project headed by Indiana University Kokomo is aimed at setting up a regional economic development collaborative.
OUR VIEW: Community leaders throughout the region should get behind this effort.
Partnerships, collaboration and networking.
Those are the key words identified by a group of more than 70 community leaders hoping to help 14 north central Indiana counties find ways to compete in the global marketplace.
That is the goal of the Regional Leadership Institute at Indiana University Kokomo. The institute grew out of a two-year study funded by a $350,000 Indiana WIRED grant to look at the possibility of a regional economic development effort involving Benton, Carroll, Cass, Clinton, Fountain, Fulton, Howard, Miami, Montgomery, Tippecanoe, Tipton, Wabash, Warren and White counties.
IU Kokomo is hoping for a grant from the Lilly Foundation to establish a regional organization staffed by two or three people whose main function would be to help communities in the 14 counties work together to accomplish goals they could not achieve on their own.
The community leaders involved in this effort have seen such regional approaches work in other parts of the country.
Members traveled to Michigan, Kentucky and North Carolina to look at how those regions managed to team up to tackle the issues they needed to tackle to make themselves more competitive on a global scale.
One delegation visited Piedmont, N.C., an area that a decade ago lost some 20,000 jobs in the furniture and tobacco industries. Now, the area is bouncing back by tapping into its hub of interstates and recently expanded freight-only airport. A regional organization like the one IU Kokomo wants to establish also targeted the largest employers in the Piedmont area to help develop a regional transportation system that takes 40,000 people a month to and from work for $2 a day each way.
The same approach can work here.
The secret is for local leaders to look beyond city and county boundaries.
It’s easy to talk about that, to say that every county in the region gains when one county has success in attracting more jobs. But it’s quite another to put that philosophy into practice. To put aside local jealousies and work together as one region.
To the extent that this effort is successful, communities throughout the 14-county region will benefit. Our hope is that community leaders will embrace the concept and work together to push this vision forward.
