Economic Development Advisor

One thing is for sure: communities love the Building Communities planning process. Plan Week is fun. A direction is set. Action steps are written by community leaders and volunteers. People are ready to go.

"If you build it, they will come!"

But what if you don’t build it? What if you only plan it?

"If you plan it, they will build it!"

Ideally, the planning phase sets the stage for the identification of the resources—human, financial and technical—to move the community into the implementation phase of the plan. Sometimes, however, this does not happen.

Building Communities offers two solutions for communities in this predicament. First, we offer our Interim Economic Developer services. As described on that page, we intentionally establish our relationship as temporary in keeping with our philosophy that in the long-run, communities themselves must establish the capacity to advance community and economic development priorities.

For communities that seek a more long-term relationship to advance important elements of the strategic plan, we offer our second service through our Implementation Division. Here we bring a diverse set of skills to communities to advance the top projects and initiatives needed to kick-start the initial progress to implement the plan.

At Building Communities, we are not just planners. We are also a team of doers. Almost everyone at Building Communities has their community and economic development roots based upon their work for specific communities doing specific projects. While we see our planning methodology as ground-breaking, we know that our planning work must lead to the implementation of projects or it becomes the proverbial report sitting on the shelf. This shall not happen!

The table below presents a list of the topics for which Building Communities’ team members have the skills to help implement projects and initiatives.

Affordable Housing Strategies
Bike/Pedestrian Planning
Capacity Building
Collaboration Facilitation
Commercial Site Design
Communications
Communications Strategy
Complete Streets Strategies
Creation of Webinars
Database Development
Development Code Review
Downtown Redevelopment
Entrepreneurship
Financial Management
Grant Administration
Grant Writing
Growth Strategies

Land-use Strategies/Zoning
Land Entitlement Strategies
Land Planning
Landscape Architecture
Livable Communities Initiatives
Master Plan Community Design
Meaningful Community Interaction
Electronic Media Production
Media Relations
Newsletter Production
Non-profit Management
Organization Development
Presentations
Project Management
Public Information Campaigns
Public Outreach
Public Policy Development

Public Relations
Public Speaking
Regional Sustainability Planning
Research
Retention & Expansion Strategies
Rural Economic Development
Scenario Planning
Smart Growth Strategies
Strategic Planning
Subdivision Design
Survey Design
Transit Corridor Planning
Transportation Planning
University Relations
Website Design
Website Production
Website Management

Ultimately, our mission is to help communities to envision and enact their future. If you find your community properly “envisioned” but stuck beginning the “enacting” phase, we can help there too. We don’t call it Building Communities for nothing!