Industrial FAM Tour

The Industrial Familiarization Tour was held today -sponsored by the Licking County Chamber of Commerce. This tour featured the Advanced Material Manufacturers in Newark and Hebron. The tour began at the McMillen Industrial Park, with a stop at Arboris. It was interesting to learn that Arboris is the world's leading producer of sterols. Sterols are derived from pine trees and used in healthy foods to lower cholesterol. Rob Klinger, Rob O'Neill, Rick Platt and Tom Denison spoke about the numerous manufacturers located in McMillen Industrial Park, COATC, Mid-Ohio Industrial Park and Newark Ohio Industrial Park. Of interest, Rick explained that the new bridge under construction at the COATC Base will directly connect to James Parkway to the Industrial Parks in Hebron, opening up all of the manufacturing corridor and furthering the opportunity for future development. He reported that $3 million will be spent in improvements and they are using 12 local companies to complete the job. Once we arrived in Hebron, the group toured Bayer Material Science. It was evident that Bayer is on the leading edge of technology by producing polymers and high-performance plastics that help their customers stay competitive and fresh.

Be sure to join us Saturday June 13 for the Community Capitalism Picnic at Tony Campolo's farm. There will be wagon rides, bon fire and cookout. This will be a great time to network and learn more about the working groups. Please rsvp by clicking here.

Marketing Working Group by Jennifer McDonald

The Marketing Working Group will be meeting this Wednesday, May 20 at noon at the Chamber office. We have compiled talking points and will be working to refine the details of these points. We plan to feature these points in the Get "In" Licking County weblinks yet to debut on local websites this summer. These talking points will be available for community leaders to borrow from and plan to offer in a powerpoint for those interested. Other items on the marketing group agenda include press coverage, further development of this blog, community scavenger hunt, and more. Please feel free to join us on Wednesday - we are always looking for new members.

Ohio Chamber of Commerce Annual Meeting - by Jennifer McDonald

Cheri Hottinger and I attended the Ohio Chamber's Annual Meeting this week. The Chamber gave a legislative briefing. You may read the entire briefing, by clicking here. They have a great staff and work very hard at advocating in these areas: taxation, education & workforce, workers' compensation, unemployment compensation, environment, energy, health care, small business and grassroots. They are also working with the Ohio Department of Development to institute an internship program that will help develop our state’s next generation of entrepreneurs while helping to ensure that some of Ohio’s brightest and most promising students remain in the state after graduation.

The panelist session brought together a handful of intriguing entrepreneurs. The moderator, John Huston is the Principal of USPrivate Companies, LLC who launched the Ohio TechAngel Fund, did a great job of leading the discussions. Of interest: Baju Shah, President and CEO of BioEnterprise, a business acceleration initative that supports the growth of bioscience companies. Since 200, it has helped more than 80 Cleveland companies that have collectively attracted more than $850 million in new funding. In addition, Bob Kington, the CEO of Toobla (available this June) explained how his new company has created a platform for users to discover, save and share any and all pieces on the Web, save it on Toobla and then share it with Facebook, MySpace or Twitter. (A site I hope to be able to use soon) And finally, Pamela Springer, President of ECNext has been recognized as an industry pacesetter within the online media space having created Manta.com, the ninth largest business information site on the web. Manta provides information on small businesses and lists many Central Ohio businesses. If you own a small business, it would be smart to get yourself listed on this site.

Outcomes By Bob Cullen - Education Support Group Member

Hallelujah! The election is over. While some schools were successful with their levies (3 winners, maybe 4), others were not (2 losses). I think that our work group should take time to celebrate the victories and reflect on the losses.

Personally, I think that the Community Capitalism Imitative, and our
Education/Community Support Work Group, contributed significantly to the successes.

We need to ask ourselves what was done that helped our schools win -- and what could we have done, or done differently, to help the others.

There are two documents that reflect, in part, the impact of our efforts.
1. A list of letters of support that were published by The Advocate, WCLT and ThisWeek Community News. Some of these were the direct result of our WG, others were influenced by our efforts. I know more letters were written and published by other papers, but I did not track those. While letters are written for every levy election, I don't think the list has ever been this long or this diverse.
2. One of the columns written by The Advocate that supported the levies. I included this one, because it clearly shows impact of our Work Group efforts.
3. Recent article in This Week talking about the impact of the Community Capitalism group.

I am sure that others can expand this list. I think we should take time to talk about our success and document what we have done -- and the impact.