In early June I attended the Western Governors Association meeting in Cle Elum. It felt like the
only day in all of June where the sun came out for a visit and the property was
redolent with the scent of Ponderosa Pine and enticements for outdoor play. I was
itching to get outside. As the Governor nears the end of her term, it was delightful to watch the repartee
between she and Governor Brian Schweitzer of Montana, a spitfire of a human.
The focus at this particular gathering was the recently
unveiled Get Out West campaign.
Interestingly, there were many medical, insurance and energy companies, but very few outdoor recreation companies in
attendance. Tom Spaletto, President of North Face, spoke about how if we don't
get younger people interested in the out of doors, he and other outdoor
recreation lines of business will shutter their doors sooner than we might
imagine possible. Addressing that concern were a number of youth ambassadors
that are tasked with finding innovative ways to get younger people outside
using hand held technology and updated forms of using the front country (parks
and more suburban and urban green areas) as a pathway to the backcountry.
The outdoor recreation economy in Washington is sizable and
includes a wide variety of active and passive recreation. Tourism is promoted and
based on Washington’s stunning natural resources and there is a growing
recognition that this is tied directly to economic development. In Washington
State, researchers anticipate a 37% increase in nature-based tourism through
2023 (RCO). Active outdoor recreation in Washington generates over $11.7
billion annually to our economy.
36.41% of the state is publicly owned lands which, if
approached as an experiential opportunity, can lead to job development
associated with experiencing public land from a variety of perspectives. This
thinking is underscored by a recent federal report regarding the economic value
of the outdoors.
At a national scale, a late 2011 report indicates that the
total economic activity associated with outdoor recreation, nature conservation
and historic preservation generates a staggering $1.6 trillion dollars
annually. Spending on hunting, fishing and wildlife viewing on National Forest
Land generated $9.5 billion in retail sales, supported 189,400 jobs and $1.1
billion in federal taxes (The Economics
Associated with Outdoor Recreation, Natural Resources Conservation and Historic
Preservation in the United States. National Fish & Wildlife Foundation,
2011).
The WGA meeting was an interesting contrast to the Washington Economic Development Commission meeting in Seattle just
a week before the WGA meeting. We have been collaborating with Teresa Lemmons
from the Washington State Microenterprise Association (WSMA) to develop greater support for microenterprise
and Small to Medium Enterprises, in the lexicon known as SMEs. As a Pacific rim
state, of course you would expect robust support for export. As a state marked
by giants such as Boeing, Amazon, Starbucks and Microsoft among many others,
you would expect a high degree of attention on high tech and IT. What threw me
however, was the complete absence- in both discussion and in the current strategy from the WEDC- attention on
microenterprise, SMEs, tourism, small scale agriculture or outdoor recreation.
In a public world of dwindling resources, we might expect
less attention on these lines of business. Broadly speaking, tourism is not identified as
a high salary field and it's possible this is related to why the industry was
not called out for attention. As a result, WSMA and Calyx are looking into
developing a small business alliance, an organizational form that will be vital
to tourism in Washington. If you are interested in participating down the road,
please contact Heidi at
heidi@calyxsite.com. We also recently received some interesting papers from
professor Chas Tolbert at Baylor University.
" Counties and parishes with a greater concentration of small,
locally-owned businesses have healthier populations -- with lower rates of
mortality, obesity and diabetes -- than do those that rely on large companies
with "absentee" owners, according to a national study by sociologists
at Baylor University and LSU."
We thought the link between health and independent business is as
interesting as the link between communities with high degrees of social capital
and prosperity.
Client Partnership
Round Up
Technically challenged, we are moving to a Wordpress format
for our site soon which will give us content management control. In the
meantime, here's some news about client
partnerships:
In 2011, Calyx became a joint venture of the Institute for Washington's Future
(IWF). IWF works on sustainable community development with a focus on
agriculture, biofuels, sustainable energy, Latino farm development and related
social justice issues. Last year we produced a comprehensive farmland
acquisition strategy for IWF and, in the process, learned a great deal regarding the wide array
of tools to help keep farmers in farming. As you might know, the median age of
farmers is 57, many don't do estate planning and as a result, their land gets
converted to development when other options have not been evaluated in time to
plan for continued farming. IWF is now working under a sizable USDA grant with
its partners to service Latino farmers outside Yakima and Tieton as new
farmers. We partnered with IWF on
several USDA grants for Harrington and Tieton but unfortunately were
unsuccessful. Undeterred, we will look at other options this year for the
business feasibility planning we are interested in pursuing in eastern
Washington.
Moving east to the sunny part of the State, we partnered
with Ken Cohen at Central Washington
University to evaluate a sustainable
tourism institute at the University. Professor Cohen teaches sustainable
tourism and has taken his students on trips overseas to Ecuador and most
recently, Vietnam, to explore how sustainable tourism is planned and
implemented at a community scale. For our analysis, we addressed economic development in
Washington, inroads for agriculinary tourism, links to outdoor recreation and
novel lodging and are happy to see the work being used in Ellensburg and as a
basis for program development. Provost Marilyn Levine and Ken Cohen are
taking a very inclusive community
approach to integrating the University into community level issues and they
have been wonderful to work with.
What happened to last summer besides the no-show sun in
July? We spent a good part of that summer writing a grant which led to a major score--
a highly competitive working lands grant from EPA's National Estuary program.
Calyx is working with the King Conservation District, Cascade Harvest Coalition
and Northwest Natural Resource Group in
the iconic Snoqualmie Valley called When
Cows Meet Clams (or when Moo
Meets Goo). The program is designed to
be a replicable model for integrating an economic development and working lands
stewardship approach to keep working lands working and build connections
between these lands and the health of Puget Sound. We have already completed an
asset inventory and maps that show assets, farm restoration, the distribution
of small forest landowners and sensitive ecological areas. The team and its
partners will provide stewardship, land tenure and marketing/tourism training, build greater market demand for local farm
and forest products and hold tours in 2013- watch out for both serious (ecology,
restoration, links with Puget Sound) and the bizarre (veggie fashion shows and much loved zombies).