(upbeat music) - Hello and welcome to "The Journal," I'm Steve Kendall.

Bowling Green State University's Center for Regional Development partners with communities, businesses, organizations, in an effort to enhance the economic vitality of Northwest Ohio.

We're joined by the interim director, Dr. Nichole Fifer.

Thank you for being here today.

Let's talk a little bit about that's sort of a quick brief thumbnail sketch of what Center for Regional Development does, but it does a lot more than that.

So give us a broader background of what the CDR does.

- Yeah, so we've been around since the eighties actually, but CRD's had a lot of lives and a lot of iterations.

But really at the core of our work is the fact that we are a EDA University Center, which means that we received some funding from the US EDA, Economic Development Administration, to provide technical assistance and resource support to local communities in Northwest Ohio.

So we serve 31 counties in Northwest Ohio.

[Steve] Wow.

- Yeah, so that full- - [Steve] That's a pretty good chunk of Ohio.

- Yes, yeah, and I mean that has grown over years, but we're at 31 counties now with our partner OU.

We share a center and so combined, we have 86 counties, so we cover most of the state.

- [Steve] All but two of the counties in the state then, wow.

[Nichole] Yeah, so we are working all over the place, if you will.

So, you know, I like to characterize the work that we do into three buckets.

We analyze, strategize, and capacity build.

So analyze, we do a lot of data analysis, as you saw in the State of the Region right, we're presenting the region with the workforce data, with the economic data.

We focused on small business, so gave that data this year.

But we're really providing those data resources to all of our constituents and through various forms.

We also do quality analysis, program evaluation.

So when you have a very specific thing that you wanna know about, we do that applied research.

The second piece of that is the strategy building.

We do community level strategy building, so that's community planning, regional planning.

I was telling you a little bit earlier, we have the four county workforce strategy, happening.

We do our R3 Program, which is county level or community level planning as well, focused on place making.

So we do all sorts of planning and strategy building, even organizational, we'll work with an individual organization, help them do a strategic plan as well.

All nonprofit community or municipality.

And then the third piece is that capacity building.

And that's where we do programs to try to help build new programs, or build new capacities within those organizations based on their strategy.

- Yeah, now, when you talk about, so for instance, a community comes to you or you go to a community and say they're trying to figure out where they want to go from where they are right now.

They develop a strategic plan.

And a lot of that, of course, obviously deals with being economically viable, because without that, you can't move plans forward.

What typically happens when you work with an organization, what are their questions?

What are, what's their, what are their major challenges usually when they come to the CRD and say, we're trying to figure something out here.

How can you help us?

- Yeah, from the community perspective, it's really usually about, I mean, at the core, it's about a couple of things.

It's about how do we create a sense of place?

How do we retain and attract population because that is workforce, right?

So, and workforce as we know, is a big issue everywhere, but we're feeling it here in Northwest Ohio.

So it's about how do we create sort of that vitality and that resilience in our community?

It's about how do we make ourselves stand out against other communities.

It's about, you know, what are the people in our community actually want us to do?

You know, a lot of times you have sort of, you know, you have your city councils and you have these community organizations, but they don't have the time and capacity to really go out to the citizens and- [Steve] Look, be on the ground and ask people what is it you want?

- Yeah, and so, and that's one of the, that's what we do.

We go out there and we do surveys, we do community engagements, you know, with R3, we get the students out there, we set up, you know, tables on Main Street and have people vote with marble jars.

I mean, we do a lot of creative stuff.

[Steve] (laughs) Yeah.

- But it's really about, you know, bringing that democratic process to the forefront and using the qualitative and quantitative research skills we have as a university to help these communities do that work.

And figure out where are we going, what do we want.

- Yeah, now, and one of the things I know, and you mentioned this too, that keeping population, attracting population is a huge thing.

And I know especially because with smaller communities, as you said, they don't have the capacity to, the time or the capacity or the revenue, maybe possibly the resources to do this.

What are is basically getting population, keeping population the major question you get?

Or is it something else?

- Um, I mean, that's, I think that's a underlying question.

I think the larger question is, you know, what does our economic future look like?

And how do we move that vision forward?

Or what, you know, what is that vision?

- Yeah, and I know for a lot of communities, if you, especially if you look over the last, you know, 20, 30, 40, 50 years, especially smaller communities and the R3 program, which we'll talk about, they've changed dramatically.

It used to be, there were a lot of small businesses, there were small manufacturing, there were all sorts of other local businesses that people lived in the community, worked in the community, or attracted people from other communities to come there.

That's a difficult challenge for small towns, and that's where R3 is kind of a focus right now.

- Yeah, so, I mean, that's exactly it, right?

We saw a huge shift in the past probably 20 years, in the way that we do shopping and the way that small towns are constructed based on that.

And so, you know, I don't think we really realized the cost to our small town vitality of losing those small mom and pop shops and those small businesses and how hard it is once they're gone to bring them back.

- [Steve] To bring them back, mm-hmm.

- And so R3 is really about helping that community create a vision of how to make their community more attractive again, to get those people to come back, to get those businesses to come back.

And each community sort of takes a very, you know, it's community driven, right?

So each community takes their own approach.

And so we go in with our team and work with a, we put together a community strategy committee, which is very different in every community, depends what it looks like.

And in Van Wert, in a larger community, you're gonna have more sort of your standard actors, your economic development director, your nonprofit foundation people.

In someplace like Gibsonburg, which is one of, you know, which is the first R3 I lead, so very close to my heart.

You know, 3,000 people you've got a retired couple and a high school kid and the mayor, and just, you know, just regular folks, and so.

And that's great because then you can really see like what people feel about their community, what that deep sentiment is and what that vision they, what do they really wanna see happen here.

And so based on that, we do that community engagement.

We go out, we talk to people, we figure out what people want, and then we give, come up with some options, with that steering committee of what are the things that we, what is the first thing we wanna focus on.

In R3 we, you know, it's completely funded by USDA.

So it's relatively low, it's not low budget, but it's not huge.

But it, you know, we start with that, what's that first step?

It's really about getting the community take that first step towards moving towards that vision and then thinking about, okay, how do we do the rest of the things?

And our hope is that through building that relationship with them, that they will come back to the CRD when they need additional assistance.

So when they're ready to take that next step, and they're, okay, we need to write a grant to get this infrastructure funding 'cause we wanna build this park, or we wanna get, you know, figure out how we can get some funding in for our small businesses who's who do we go to what federal agency?

And we can make those connections.

- Help make those connections.

When we come back, I'd like to ask you too about when you go into a community, do you get differing ideas of what the visions would be?

And you can explain how you, you work your way through that and get people to come to a consensus.

Back in just a moment here with the Interim Director for the Center for Regional Development at Bowling Green State University.

Dr. Nichole Fifer here on "The Journal" back in a moment.

Thank you for staying with us on "The Journal."

Our guest is Dr. Nichole Fifer from the Center for Regional Development at Bowling Green State University.

Dr. Fifer, you were talking about, you know, in the communities you're talking with people, you're trying to find out what their ideas are, their visions for where they want their community to go.

I'm sure when you go out, you must get a variety of ideas about what my town should be like in the future, what I like about it, what I don't like about it, what I'd like it to be, what I don't want it to be.

So when you get that, that's where your analysis comes in.

But talk about how you, you look at that and when you're talking with people and get 180 degree difference on we should be this.

No, no, we should be that.

How do you, how do you work with people and get them then and to kind of focused to do something that will benefit their community?

- Yep, well we have different methodologies for sure.

It really kind of depends on the size of the community, how much time we have, what they're, you know, what they wanna do.

We allow the steering committee to sort of make some decisions there as well.

But really I think it comes down to a few things.

One, it's about multiple layers of community engagement.

So often we start with, you know, with the steering committee and sort of do like a SWAT analysis.

Like what are the things that are really great about your community?

What are the things that are challenging?

What are some maybe opportunities that you haven't been able to harvest or that sort of underlying potential, like we were talking about Gibsonburg, you know, they have those quarries.

One is a swimming quarry that does scuba diving lessons.

Like you can get a certification there.

A lot of people don't know that.

People come from all over the country to go scuba dive 'cause it's so deep.

But then they have a second one that they didn't really know what to do with yet.

And so thinking about, well, can you make it like a canoe livery?

Can you make it a kayaking destination?

Things like that, so it's really about, okay, what are those assets you have and how can we leverage those and what are the things that are not working for you that we need to address?

And so then you get kind of a list of problems and opportunities.

And so you can then take that to the community in a survey and get that broad feedback where you're gonna get, you know, everything under the sun.

But you usually get some pretty decent patterns in those responses.

- Got it, so you pick up some, yeah, some, yeah.

Because I know one of the things, and especially in communities, sometimes you, you don't realize you have assets, you're so close to them, you don't notice it.

And one of the examples, people always ask me, because I live, you know, we live near Cedar Point there, well you must go every day, it's like, well, no, but for them, someone who doesn't live around here, they look at that, it's like, well you'd go there every day it's such a great thing.

And we may sometimes overlook that.

Like the quarries for a long time, people overlooked, well what are we gonna do with the old quarry?

It just sits there.

But they found ways now to turn it into a, into a positive and into a, into an opportunity to develop things that maybe people never thought about before.

- Yeah, exactly and so I think sometimes it's really about just one, having an outside person ask some questions, right, about these things.

And then taking those ideas to the community and figuring out like what people have been thinking about.

Because sometimes it's amazing to find out all the things that people have been tinkering in their minds about, well, what we should really do with this space.

- Yeah, but never mentioned it or move on it or thought anybody else would think it was a great idea.

- Yeah, or they've been having these conversations around town about what they wanna do at this space.

And yet no one has really sort of publicly like said like, "Hey, everybody wants us to be a farmer's market.

Can we do that?"

So yeah, it's those kind of opportunities.

- Yeah, now when you start to develop hose trends, does everybody, I mean obviously not everybody agrees and how, so how do you overcome that when somebody says, I really don't want this town to have more, you know, because there are places where they kinda like it just the way it is, a certain part of the population.

How do you overcome that and say, look, we can, we can open this up and yet still you can keep the things that you like, but this will also enhance the things you already have.

- Yeah, so one of the components that we often do in the R3 project and in other community level strategies is we have some, what we call, we call them education sessions, but I feel like that's a really not apt description.

So, you know, we basically hold public forums where we present the ideas that have come out from those community engagements and show them like, look, this is what your fellow community members have said that they want.

And let's look at some other communities that have done similar things and see how it panned out.

And so that helps them to sort of put some perspective around it.

And usually that gets most of the people who have reservations to be like, oh, okay, yeah.

Maybe that is the thing, or they see, you know, this, the options differently and they're like, okay, maybe this is really what we wanna do.

We're not ready for this.

And at the end of the day, it's always the steering committee, the community steering committee that makes the decisions, 'cause it's their community is their resources.

And we make that very clear, you know, we will give you, we will feedback to you what you have told us in aggregate.

And then you have to decide.

- Ah, now as you, as you get to that point, once you're at that point, then what's the next step that you guys take to help them achieve what they believe is the direction they want to go?

- Well, depending on the project, so often it's just putting together an implementation strategy for them laying out the steps.

If it's something, if some of those first steps are things that we at the university can assist with, whether it's writing a grant for some money or you know, engaging any other part of the university to do a feasibility study or to do something like that, then we try to figure out if there is a resource to tap into.

And, you know, a lot of times really it's the money looking for those financial resources.

- Well and you make a good point too, that especially with the university, you have other resources, other centers, other units that can also then provide assistance in a way that that CRD doesn't or they're the experts in that you bring them in to then say, okay, here's how you can take this idea and maximize it.

And that's a good thing for communities because obviously as we've talked about, they don't have the resources and maybe it's just a simple thing, as you kind of said, it's just a new set of eyes looking at what's there and what isn't there and what could be there.

And that's a message you probably try to sell them to.

It's like, look, we've, we've stepped back.

We're not, we see the benefits in the community, we see the challenges.

Here's how you can, you can do this and make, and basically try to build the community for the future.

Because that's what this is about too is not just today, but where do you want to be in 5, 10, 20, 30 years?

Hopefully we can predict that far out.

I know we can't actually, but at least point you in a direction of future growth and development.

- Yeah, well, and I mean, you can't get anywhere if you don't have a vision for what that looks like, right?

And I think one of the things that we hear the most when we go out into these communities is, you know, the community has changed over time and that young people leave.

And they go look for opportunities and we want them to do that.

We want them to go and get an education and learn new things and have experiences, but they want them to come back home.

And start that small business or, you know, run that farm or whatever it may be.

And so, you know, if you don't have that vision for what your community looks like in 20 years and it's not a place that your kids wanna come back to raise their kids at.

- Then there's a problem, we've got a serious problem, yeah.

- And so I think for a lot of them, really it's just that first step of like, let's have a vision for what the future looks like.

Something that we can kind of rally around and get excited about.

- Well, we come back, we can talk a little more about that, and then also talk about the State of the Region because there's a lot of information there.

You got a lot of great speakers there talking about the topics that are important to not just Ohio, but basically these are national themes that run through a lot of this as well.

Back in just a moment with Dr. Nichole Fifer from the BGSU Center for Regional Development here on "The Journal."

Thank you for staying with us here on "The Journal," our guest as Dr. Nichole Fifer from the Bowling Green Center for Regional Development.

You know, we were talking in the last segment about communities and when you go in and you try to help them with their vision of the future, not always are people, some people aren't necessarily don't want things to change in their community.

When those challenges come up, and one of the things that we talked about off air a little bit was the fact that you want people to come back to the community, you want them to bring businesses back, all of that.

But that then changes the where the way the community is.

And housing especially is a big issue because most small towns aren't endowed with lots of housing around just waiting for people to come back and move into.

And that means change.

That means something's gonna change in the town in terms of what that a piece of property looks like, what that means in terms of more people in the town, et cetera, et cetera, so that's a big challenge for communities because they want growth, but they wanna be able to manage that growth the way they want to, and that's, that's a difficult task.

- Yeah, it really is.

And I think, I think really for communities to do this well it's about, it's about creating those opportunities to participate in that discussion.

And you're always gonna have folks who don't want any change at all.

And there's not a whole lot you can do about that.

But what you can do is make sure that they feel heard and that they get to participate in these decision processes and that they understand that the reason these changes, that the others want these changes to happen, right.

That if we don't bring the housing, then the kids don't come back.

And if the kids don't come back, then the businesses don't stay and then you don't have your grocery store and is, you know.

[Steve] Yeah, it's, yeah.

There's a, there's a rippling effect that takes place when you stay static.

- Exactly.

And you know, I think they're, that most people are fearful that the bad things that are gonna happen are like the things that already happened, but directing them towards, well here's, here's the other option, right.

Here's how we bring this community.

Maybe it looks differently than it did it in the past, but maybe we get it back towards the vibrancy that it used to have.

Just slightly changed.

And so it's always hard to accept that, you know, economies change, communities change, cultures change.

And generations change, they want different things.

They wanna live in different places.

- And a different style, a different arrangement it isn't all necessarily single family homes.

It may be they don't want the responsibility or the, you know, the basically the effort that requires, oh, I don't want to have a yard to maintain, I want to have a place to live and then I'm gonna do this.

So it's a different approach to maybe the traditional way small towns have, have looked at things.

- Yeah, and well, I think the, for me, one of the most interesting sort of pieces of feedback that we've gotten from a lot of these communities is it's not only the young people that want those different types of housing But it's also the older folks, because as you age you don't want all of that, right.

Managing that big farm is too much now, and but they don't wanna leave their town either.

And so we also, with the baby boomer generation aging and we, we also have to think about how do we create housing that's, you know, creates multi-generational opportunities.

- Sure, yeah and is functional for their needs now versus when they were 25, 30, 35 people who are 65, 70, 80, 85, Because obviously the other thing that's probably changed is people are living a lot longer and that changes the needs of a village or a town or a small city as well.

- Yes, absolutely.

And I, you know, a lot of our, I mean a lot of the older generation folks that we've talked to also want some of the amenities that the younger people want as well.

They want that coffee shop to go to, that bookstore, because now they're retired and they want stuff to do.

- Yeah, they've got time and they, now they can go out and enjoy those sort of things.

When you, when you look at that too, and I know and you made a good point when you said, look, economies change, towns change over time.

There's a reason why these towns were in place at one time.

They grew there for a reason.

That reason may be totally a hundred percent different than it is now.

And that's what you probably have to talk with people about.

And you mentioned Gibsonburg with the quarries.

Those quarries were there because they were taking stone out of there.

Not because they were thinking, oh, in the future this will be a recreational or a training area for scuba diving.

So you have to look at that, that as the transition that takes place.

- Yeah, and I think that sometimes it's hard for communities to accept that those things aren't coming back.

Or that there isn't a very similar alternative that will take place in their, in their small town or in their even larger cities.

I mean, you know, just the economy changes and so really sort of laying, that's where like the data piece can be very helpful.

Where we can look and say, look, here's the market trends.

Right, these are the businesses and the industries that are growing in your region, and these are the ones that are not.

- They're not, and probably aren't going to come back to the level that yeah.

And that's the insight people need because I think they always say, well, you know, this'll come back, you know, it will, it'll restore back to full employment, say at a factory.

And maybe the activity is the manufacturing facility is now not in tune with where that, the direction that manufacturing's going or the cost to renovate it becomes unacceptable for the company there.

And so they're not gonna reinvest in that.

So you have to look at what you, how you can repurpose or, or redevelop that area.

- [Nichole] Exactly, yeah.

- Now one of the things we've talked about, obviously a little bit is we, this involves people literally when we talk about the economy, and you guys touched on it, I know all the times I've talked to Center for Regional Development, providing workforce for now and in the future, not yesterday's economy, not last year's economy, not 10 years ago, not 20 years ago.

That's a big focus now for everybody and see everybody I've talked about economic development, one of the things they, oh, workforce, we gotta find workforce, gotta train, have to do this because here's where we need to be five years from now and we have to start now to get there.

So you guys deal with workforce development.

I dunno if that's the right term anymore, but that's a big part of this.

- Yeah, so we, I think we touch workforce in a myriad of ways.

You know, one through that sort of attraction, retention piece, right, like the young folks piece, obviously here at BG we're really always thinking about how we're developing professionals and we do have a cadre of students that work for us at CRD that we are giving those professional skills and trying to make young community and economic developers and analysts out of them.

But then there's the strategy building piece.

And so one of the big projects we've been working on the past couple years is a workforce strategy for the four county region.

So Lucas, Wood, Ottawa, and Fulton Counties.

And this is an EDA funded project, big project, partnership with RGP and Jobs Ohio.

And really sort of digging into what does this region, this four, which is our CEDS region as well, our Comprehensive Economic Development Strategy.

Thinking about, you know, what are the workforce needs here and where are the holes and what are we doing that we need to keep doing and what do we need to change?

And so that's been a big project for us.

And again, it really comes down to using those, those qualitative research skills and going out and talking to people and figuring out what's going on.

And then getting all of those regional stakeholders together to have these conversations and really figuring out, you know, what are the, what are the realities we're facing?

So, that dwindling population, workforce deficit is just a real thing here.

So we focus a lot about, on attracting jobs and we should.

But we're honing in more on very specific types of jobs than we did in the past.

And realizing that some, some things maybe have to be less of a priority in the context of just numbers because we don't have the people.

- Yeah, to do every, to do everything, meet all of these, meet all of these needs.

And and so the ones that are on the lower end.

Yeah, are gonna unfortunately are gonna be on the lower end of the, of your ability to develop people for that.

- Right, and well, we have to think about are there ways that we can tap into efficiency, effectiveness, automation right, to sort of decrease the demands in certain production areas.

And, you know, to meet those needs.

And then also think about how are we being more inclusive in our workforce and how are we leveraging folks who have been historically disenfranchised or excluded from workforce opportunities?

A big thing is transportation.

How do we get folks from here to here?

Because unfortunately we have a lot of businesses that are quite far out from the, from the- - From where, where people live, right.

- Where people live, and again, going back to that housing thing, right.

So if you can't afford to commute there and you can't afford to live there, how do we, how do we facilitate that process?

So, and up scaling.

- Yeah, now we've got just about 40 or 50 seconds, what's the next newest thing that you guys are looking at?

What's the next new initiative you're talking about?

And they say 30 seconds, sorry, yeah.

- Well, public health, we've been doing a lot of health equity work in terms of quality improvement work, we've been on a couple of grants from the state of Ohio thinking about ways that we can improve coordinated care systems.

Because this is a big economic development thing, right.

If you don't have a healthy workforce that's engaging.

So we are also now looking to see how we can help our local health departments with our academic health departments program with HHS.

We've partnered with them to try to think about how we can provide more strategy building, data analysis, those types of resources to our public health professionals.

- Oh, look forward to talking about that, because obviously that's a huge part of what, what's going to happen in the future here.

So thank you so much, Dr. Nichole Fifer, Center for Regional Development, Bowling Green State University, thank you.

- Thank you.

- Yeah, you can check us out at WBGU.org.

You can watch us every Thursday night at eight o'clock on WBGU-PBS, we will see you again next time.

Good night and good luck.

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