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New pilot development program introduced at town hall meeting More than 60 Washington-Wilkes leaders met Monday night to hear about a new state pilot program that's designed to help rural communities help themselves to gain the tools and resources they need to make an economic turnaround. The proposed Communities of Opportunity town hall meeting at the Wilkes Senior Center introduced the pilot program, a partnership of the Georgia Rural Development Council, the University of Georgia's Fanning Institute, and the Georgia Department of Community Affairs. The Communities of Opportunity is being tried out in Region 7 because it has a good cross-section of rural Georgia's strengths and liabilities. The effort came out of conversations between Department of Community Affairs Commissioner Mike Beatty and Governor Sonny Perdue, and is said to be a new look at how communities and the state work together to improve development in rural areas. "This isn't a new program," said the Fanning Institute's Matthew L. Bishop, "it's a new philosophy for community development. We're going to focus on the unique characteristics of the community." The program would also use benchmarks and selfassessments to track results from any project resulting from the program. The Communities of Opportunity Initiative is designed, he said, to "enhance the capacity of rural communities to be more successful - more successful in the sense that communities have the resources and tools necessary for families and businesses to prosper." At the town hall meeting, Bishop showed the Economic Vitality Index for Georgia in 1980, and then showed the same index for 2001. A large number of counties, including Wilkes, had gone from "developing" to "lagging," while urban counties and counties in North Georgia continued to thrive. Local participants used networked laptop computers to enter their opinions on questions posed by Bishop, including what people value about living in Wilkes County, what they saw as weaknesses, and what they would change about their community. Answers from each table were projected for the meeting to see, and Bishop went through and remarked on the answers. This is the first step for the pilot program, Bishop said. The Fanning Institute is doing surveys and interviews and conducting town hall meetings from Waynesboro in Burke County to Millen in Jenkins County. A similar town hall meeting will be held in Lincolnton at 6:30 p.m. October 9 at the Lincoln Center.
The results from the preliminary research may lead to programs focused on individual issues in specific areas, Bishop said, in which communities sign a "Contract With Georgia" to partner with the state and fix those specific issues.
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