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Here's a news release from The Valley Innovation Alliance in northern Alabama and southern Tennessee:

NEWS  RELEASE

June 23, 2008

FOR MORE INFORMATION, CONTACT:  Janet Kincherlow-Martin

  Director of Public Relations

  (256) 306-2561

  jkm@calhoun.edu

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

 

VIA/WIRED Awards over $1.2 M in grants to regional workforce and economic development projects

 

Howell Lee, president of Valley Innovation Alliance (VIA), today announced that over $1.2 million in grants have been awarded to 16 different projects as part of the U.S. Department of Labor's Workforce Innovation for Regional Economic Development (WIRED) initiative. VIA is the local region created through WIRED, for which Calhoun Community is the local fiscal agency.

According to Lee, the funded projects will in some way impact all 23 counties which comprise the VIA region.  The region is made up of 14 north Alabama counties (Blount, Colbert, Cullman, Dekalb, Franklin, Jackson, Lauderdale, Lawrence, Limestone, Madison, Marion, Marshall, Morgan and Winston) and 9 counties in southern middle Tennessee (Giles, Franklin, Lawrence, Lewis, Lincoln, Marion, Marshall, Maury and Wayne).

"I commend the selection committee on their work in selecting the projects we funded for this cycle," said Lee.  "We received 35 applications for some excellent projects and were able to fund 16 of these programs.  The committee had the difficult job of determining which proposals best met the established funding criteria while also considering which would have the most significant impact on our region, and they did an outstanding job in their deliberations and final decisions," he added.

Grant awards for this cycle ranged from $21,150 - $158,862. Awards over

$100,000 went to projects that were regional in scope and serve at least a 3-county area.

Grant proposals were evaluated on several criteria, which included the following: 

Sustainable:  Preference was given to activities that showed potential for sustainability beyond the one-year period of performance and the three-year period of the VIA grant.

Industry-driven:  Projects funded under the Initiative must meet needs of industry.  In the case of programs at the high school or community college levels, projects should also provide STEM skills that will allow students to move into careers in the selected industry clusters.

Replicable:  Successful projects should be replicable to other parts of the region and/or country.

Quantifiable Project Outcomes:  Applicants must demonstrate a results-oriented approach by describing the proposed outcome measures relevant to measuring success and the long-term impact of the project.  Grant awardees will be required to submit quarterly progress reports to the VIA Office based on these performance measures in compliance with US Department of Labor guidelines

Each criterion was valued at 25 points for a total of 100 possible points with five additional points possible for demonstrating active partnerships.(Funded projects are detailed below)

In addition to the 16 recent grant awards,  20  projects listed in the original grant proposal were approved by the U.S. Department of Labor as Jump Start projects funded through the VIA Initiative.   These included awards to Calhoun Community College, the Hudson Alpha Institute for Biotechnology, the Partnership for Biotechnology Research, the Huntsville/Madison County Chamber of Commerce, AZ Technology, Biztech, Columbia State Community College, Motlow State Community College, Vanderbilt University and South Central Tennessee Workforce Alliance.

The Valley Innovation Alliance (VIA) is a non-profit 501(c)(6) organization covering a 23-county region in northern Alabama and southern Tennessee and is dedicated to maximizing and connecting workforce and economic development  and innovation across the region.

The Workforce Innovation for Regional Economic Development (WIRED) initiative was created last year through a $5 million grant from the U.S. Department of Labor with the ultimate goal of expanding employment and advancement opportunities for American workers and catalyzing the creation of high-skilled and high-wage opportunities.

At the Boston Academy, Ed Morrison gave a helpful overview of WIRED Nation, what you as a WIRED Nation user should try to get out of it, and what you can do to contribute and interact in the community itself:

If you don't have an effective way to structure information, you end up with a 'garbage bag' of stuff - this is why on WIRED Nation we are making effective use of categories and tagging. It helps the community identify common themes as it to relates to a piece of content, such as 'advanced manufacturing', 'biosciences', etc. Moreover, categories and tags allow you to search using the 'Advanced Search' to

A few key components of WIRED Nation include:

• Forums: essentially a running list of comments - a discussion unfolding as a series of comments on comments
  

• Weblogs aka 'Blogs': generally represent a way for an individual to share information with a group
• Wikis: a fantastic way for more than one person to create content ; a quick and easy way for business professionals to be able to author content to the web quickly and effective - in a matter of minutes.
• RSS: allows you to grab content from the web and be automatically updated anytime any content is changed on that webpage.

In WIRED Nation, we have the following tabs:

• 'Forums' is an area for you to have ongoing discussions around particular topics
• 'Regions' is a wiki page which has been created to share the industry segments, key contacts, implementation plan, etc. in each region.
  
• 'Home' is yet another great example of a wiki page in action - this is a easily editable webpage including graphics, a slideshow, etc., which is updated by members of WIRED Nation, not an IT professional.
  
• 'Stories' is where we are sharing complex stories of what is working in various WIRED regions.
• 'Library' is where we are putting files - files can include a detailed description of what a particular file is
• 'Events' is a great place for us to share schedules for key sessions and events with other regions.
  

WIRED Nation is an open community which allows us to have the most qualified and well represented discussion - there is no 'webmaster', but rather the community as a whole driving the discussion.

A few points Ed emphasized include:

Categorization and tagging.

According to Ed, "categories are like the chapters of a book." For example, in WIRED Nation they include broad ideas and concept areas such as 'Innovation', 'Entrepreneurship', 'Talent', etc. Tags, however "are like the index in the back of the book." Use categories and tags together to make if far easier to find content later as well as to help people more quickly deduce what the relevance of a particular post is.

Weekly Webinars

Fridays at 1PM EST, we have a webinar in which we discuss what is new in WIRED Nation, and go over regional initiatives and how to increase visibility and support for these initiatives in the community using WIRED Nation.

Blogging:

The blog is a great way to quickly share points of interest with the rest of WIRED Nation - maybe a paragraph our two or a link to an interesting research finding or editorial related to economic development.

Jump in - contributing takes only a few minutes. The Law of Networks states that value accrued from a network increases exponentially as each new connection is added.