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| MATR Newsletter - Fri Nov 17, 2006 |
Many thanks to the newest Sponsors of MATR: PrintingForLess.com http://www.printingfor ... .com/ , Modwest.com http://www.modwest.com/ and Highway 12 Ventures http://www.highway12ve ... .com/ and to the Supporters: Boomtown Institute http://www.boomtownins ... .com/ , Vision Net, Inc. http://www.vision.net/ ... x.php , The Burton K. Wheeler Center http://www.montana.edu ... x.htm , The Montana Community Finance Corporation http://www.mtcommunity ... .org/ , and Grupthink http://www.grupthink.com/ --- MATR Offers Outstanding Marketing Opportunities for Inland Northwest Regional Companies and Organizations http://www.matr.net/ar ... .html
Come Home Montana
Montana Community Finance Corporation
- Come Home Montana - Outstanding Career Opportunity - Executive Director
Seeking dynamic, outgoing, personable leader for economic development organization.
- Come Home Montana- Career Opportunity - Sales Manager - The Missoula Independent
Applicants should have a background in media; sales management experience strongly preferred.
Developing Tech Jobs in Rural Communities
- Montana Community Finance Corporation - Helping Business Take the Next Step- Fall 2006 Newsletter
"Serving Montana's small businesses since 1984"
Montana Education Excellence
- Attracting job talent topic of presentation
How are businesses going to compete for the remaining talent?
Education
- SD2 program swiftly enhances students' reading skills
Read 180 is an intensive, 90-minute reading class designed to bring struggling readers in the fourth through 12th grades up to reading at their grade level. The program helped improve the reading skills of about 350 students last year, and 867 students are enrolled in the classes this year.
- Missoula COT might offer dual-credit plan to high schoolers
Jim Clark, superintendent of Missoula County Public Schools, and COT Dean Barry Good have been working on setting up a dual-credit system between the COT and Missoula’s high schools, in which juniors and seniors would be eligible to take a language arts or math class at the COT and earn both high school and college credit.
Montana Business
- Regents address Bitterroot higher ed
“Everybody up there in Ravalli County is so excited they can hardly stand it,”
- Professors honored for creativity
"The power of knowledge is most relevant when applied outside of the classroom,"
- The Salish and Kootenai College in Pablo receives $398K for Truck Driving and Heavy Equipment School
"SKC has done a remarkable job training heavy equipment operators and truck drivers," said MDT Director Jim Lynch. "The college serves a key role in providing skilled individuals to work in the state's $350 million-a-year highway construction industry."
- Montana Colleges can achieve greater success
We can also do a better job of ensuring students are adequately prepared for college.
Montana Meth Project
- Montana State University worried about lack of employees
MSU is finding it so hard to hire and keep custodians, one-third of those jobs are vacant, Gamble said. MSU can only pay $8.25 to start, while other employers are offering $10 to $11.75.
- Former CEO of Aspen Skiing Co. Laments Real Estate Development as "Necessary Evil" to Survive
"We got into a capital shootout," he said, referring to the competition among resorts to add gondolas, high-speed chairlifts and upscale restaurants on the ski area slopes. Once the industry started adding faster lifts, customers' expectations grew. Now a competitive resort must have the whole mountain covered with high-speed chairs or risk getting shunned. There was no way ski area operators could pay for all the amenities simply by "selling lift tickets and cheeseburgers,"
Montana Economic Development
- Thomas and Stacey Siebel Foundation Issues $5 Million Challenge Grant for the Montana Meth Project
Donation Kicks Off 2007 Capital Campaign to Continue Groundbreaking Meth Prevention Program
Developing Funding Opportunities in Montana
- Request for Proposals - West Yellowstone College Feasibility Study
The Northern Rocky Mountain Resource Conservation and Development (RC&D) is requesting proposals for a West Yellowstone College Feasibility Study to determine the best course of action for expanding and diversifying the town’s economy through a higher education opportunity.
- Conference tracks Montana sprawl
Western Montana is looking a lot like Colorado did 25 years ago — which in turn looks like California in the 1930s.
- MEDA to Coordinate Statewide Business Expansion and Retention (BEAR) Program.
Are you interested in serving as the “point person” for your area?
- Update of attached Summary of Eastern MT Econ Strategy DRAFT
Eastern Montana people have taken part in numerous economic development strategy and planning sessions. The following is a general summary of these efforts. The list is not all-inclusive, but does provide an overview of the primary strategies, goals, needs and a few opportunities consistently identified across the region.
- Havre and the Hi-Line to benefit from $1MM telemedicine grant
The USDA Rural Development grant funds telemedicine programs that allow some patients in rural areas to receive the same levels of service as patients in more urban areas do.
- Getting the Growth You Want in Montana: A Citizens Guide to Subdivisions and Smart Growth
Funding and Building your Business
- U.S. Treasury Department To Conduct New Markets Tax Credit Application Workshop, 12/4, Billings, MT
The NMTC Program attracts private-sector capital investment into the nation’s urban and rural low-income areas to help finance community development projects, stimulate economic growth, and create jobs.
Regional Economic Development
- What Entrepreneurs Need to Know
A smart way to divide stock, VC interest in early-stage companies, doing business related to Cuba, the pros and cons of advertising on Google and Yahoo!
- When getting a loan from family or friends, don't borrow trouble
Before pursuing bank loans, backing from investors or even credit card advances, consider approaching a family member or friends for financial help.
- How to Make Your Web Site Sing for You
Your Web site is like a digital business card, designers say, the first online look at your company that a customer gets. With luck, it will not be the last.
- More than Job Demands or Personality, Lack of Organizational Respect Fuels Employee Burnout
"It is often not the job that burns you out, but the organization."
- Funding Your Dream
The topics include: * Getting to venture capitalists * How to make a presentation * The optimal length of a business plan * How to handle the valuation process * Role changes in the founding team
- Opportunity Knocks, And It Pays a Lot Better
Managers like to say employees leave companies because of bad bosses or lack of career growth. A new report suggests a more straightforward reason: money.
Utah Economic Development
- Author offers cities planning tips to avoid big-box blues
Cities don't have to be overrun by big-box retailers such as Wal-Mart and Target
Government Technology
- 'Fast-track' bill for rural firms gets OK
"We see a great opportunity for us to grow local businesses, and it doesn't take a lot in rural Utah to create a meaningful job or a meaningful opportunity for them. This will give us the opportunity to really take care of that."
Universities and Economic Development
- NASCIO Releases "Profiles of Progress: State Health IT Initiatives"
This compendium provides a state-by-state "snapshot" of progress that each state has made in the health information technology (HIT) implementation process.
Incubators and R&D
- Audit: Montana University system lacking in tracking of federal earmarks. Administrators defended money spent on lobbying activities
Officials overseeing Montana’s colleges and universities don’t do enough to manage the flow of millions of non-competitive federal dollars coming into Montana schools, a new report concludes.
Small Diameter Timber Utilization
- Herpes vaccine investigated at Montana State University
A study by a Montana State University researcher suggests a new avenue for developing a vaccine against genital herpes and other diseases caused by herpes simplex viruses.
- $35 mil in state funds set aside for research grants
The non-profit group secured $35 million in state funds Wednesday and unveiled a plan to pass that money along to startups, university researchers, students, teachers and others as part of an ambitious effort to foster a research-based economy in Arizona.
Careers
- Making Ethanol from Wood Chips
One startup is scaling up experimental techniques to demonstrate the commercial potential of cellulosic ethanol.
- Wood on the web: New online business, TimberBuySell.com aims to connect sellers, buyers of forest products
It's like a dating service for the forest products industry.
Non-Profit News
- Focusing on the Issue of Aging, and Growing Into the Job
“We need to be thinking differently about aging,” Dr. Butler said over breakfast at his Manhattan offices. “People are living about 30 years longer than they used to. That means that society is going to have more older people, and we’re going to need different priorities and mindsets.”
Energy
- Missoula Nonprofit Network Training -"Nonprofit Budgets And Financial Reporting", 11/21, Missoula
Karen Neel, CPA from Boyle, Deveny& Meyer PC will lead a discussion about nonprofit budgets and financial reporting. Karen is a nonprofit board member and volunteer as well as working professionally with many local nonprofits. This workshop is recommended for nonprofit staff and board members.
Making the Most of the American Prairie
- "1/2" - How to cut your energy consumption and Green House emissions by half
The links 1) show how we are doing, 2) provide details on the energy saving projects we are doing, and 3) give some ideas on starting your own 1/2 program.
- The City of Boulder, Colorado makes history by approving the nation's first carbon tax.
Boulder, Colo., will charge residents and businesses the carbon tax based on how much electricity they use.
Connectivity & Communications
- "Prairie Whispers: A Vision Of Montana's Grasslands And The Great Plains", 11/17, Billings
"This place is so flat, treeless, desolate! It's just a vast brown land of nothingness!"
Commuter Rail Development
- Wireless Internet's new target: Seattle homes
Clearwire, wireless pioneer Craig McCaw's latest venture, is officially launching a new service in Seattle that provides Internet service to the home wirelessly. The service, a form of an emerging technology called WiMax, operates through a system of towers that transmit and receive signals allowing users to be online.
- Paris Wants To Woo The 'Creative Class' - "A Farewell to Arms" on a laptop?
Though it may be a little hard to imagine Hemingway writing "A Farewell to Arms" on a laptop, Delanoe is betting that "le Wi-Fi" (pronounced "wee-fee" here) is one of many changes in Paris that will attract creative spirits as well as legions of young people who might otherwise flee the tradition-bound city for places closer to the cutting edge.
Leadership Montana
- Call For 'Rails, Not Roads'
Transportation officials' love affair with highways has gone far enough; it's time to explore alternatives
- Group pushing train service into Colo ski country from Wyoming to N.M
"We can become the one that sets the standard for the rest of the nation to follow,"
Cool Stuff That's Coming
- Invitation to Activists and Community Builders - Earn a Degree While Working For Your Community
You are already a leader if you are working in community development. Here is a chance to: Invest in yourself and your community at the same time, Become part of a national multicultural network for social change.
- Charging Batteries without Wires
New MIT research reveals a way to send wireless energy to mobile phones and laptops.
- Brilliant Minds on the Next 50 Years
If the revelations of the last 50 years are anything to go on - the internet and the human genome for example - we probably have not even thought up the exciting advances that lay ahead of us.
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