The following column is provided by Fulton Economic Development Corp. Executive Director Michael Ladd:
Two weeks ago, 26 Fulton County businesses and citizens gathered in the learning center in Rochester for a two-day training session on community development and engagement principles as part of the Rural Empowerment and Development (RED) program.
Fulton County is one of four counties to participate in the RED program, a capacity-building and planning initiative created by the Indiana Office of Community and Rural Affairs (OCRA) and the Indiana Communities Institute at Ball State University. RED is intended to support selected communities in a countywide planning processes. Cass, Huntington and Orange counties also were selected to participate in the program. Fulton County was the second of the four to conduct its two-day session.
Based on input from the training sessions, the Indiana Communities Institute will help develop an engagement plan that the group will use over the next six months to collect data, which in turn will help to identify and direct the future steps of the remainder of the program. Presenters explained the plan will help Fulton County’s community members focus on engaging others to learn what kind of community they want to see and how to improve what is already here. In other words, build a new future for Fulton County.
Our RED group has named itself Your Future Fulton County. Its goal is to foster coordination and collaboration across our local communities with the object of making our counties better at solving their individual and collective problems.
In the coming weeks, as more information is synthesized and released, I will pass that information along.
To learn more about the RED program, visit www.in.gov/ocra/red/.
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