SEDP Holds Annual Meeting June 23, 2017 On June 22nd, SEDP held our Annual Meeting for investors and stakeholders at the Michigan Laborer’s Training & Apprenticeship Institute in Perry. The event highlighted a number of exciting projects from the last year, presented our Project of the Year award to Cargill for their new animal feed facility under construction in the City of Owosso, and recapped our new strategic plan and the results of our just completed fundraising campaign. The highlighted projects were presented in a video format this year. That video can now be viewed here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k0m-TyBur54 The Project of the Year, Cargill, sees the global agribusiness building a 75,000 sq ft animal feed plant in the City of Owosso. The facility will bring $19M in investment to the city, and is the first of its kind in Michigan. Kathryn Burkholder representing the award sponsor, Consumers Energy, presented the award to Cargill’s Steve Stoutenberg. SEDP Board of Directors Vice-Chair Joe Sawyer presented a new strategic plan for the organization. This plan will build off the organization’s success, while expanding to address new needs that have been identified in the community. The three areas of focus are: Business Growth: The current core of the SEDP mission will see a more focused strategy on targeting business interests to attract to the county, enhancing regional partnerships to better leverage resources, and bringing government and private interests together to facilitate real estate development to expand our offerings. Building the Talent Pipeline: Expand the organization’s work with the K12 system to begin introducing students to career opportunities available in the community, as well as connecting the business community and schools to better communication about current and future needs. Market Intelligence: Use data driven analysis to direct resources toward client needs and addressing gaps in service, increasing targeted attraction outreach, and determining possible baseline for establishing minimum prospect qualifications. To best implement this expanded line of work, the board identified the need to increase the organization budget to $400,000 annually. In collaboration with Resource Development Group, the staff and board completed a capital campaign to attempt to raise funds to support this budget goal. The campaign is now complete, after successfully raising an annual budget of $404,386. The program now has 166 investors, 46 who joined the program as a part of this capital campaign.
