By Aaron Sena-Stevens –
GrowRaton hosted the Rural Community Assistance Corporation (RCAC), which held the first of a four part workshop series, at the Raton Convention Center On Thursday, March 21st.
GrowRaton’s Community Coordinator,Patricia Duran, and the RCAC Facilitators organized the workshop, with sponsorship from International Bank and the Center for Community Innovation.
As a non-profit organization, RCAC has a central office located in Sacramento, CA and serves 13 western states. RCAC only serves communities with 10,000 population or less, however, they typically work with communities with 5,000 or less. The vision for RCAC is to create vibrant, healthy, and enduring rural communities. The program itself, is built with many successful organizations and models, such as the Wealth Works and the Recharge Our Community Economics (ROCE) models currently being applied to Raton.
The ROCE modeled workshop focused on the principles of Re-vitalizing, Re-building, Re-discovering, and Re-charging the community through identifying types of wealth, historical economic trends, and forming value-chains to promote local entrepreneurship. This first ROCE and WealthWorks workshop is a “Phase 1” within the strategic planning process and assists the community to explore the expansion of our economic development toolkit, build economic resilience, and community self-reliance.
The overall outcome of the entire workshop series is to increase the local entrepreneurship and jobs, develop catalytic projects that seed additional businesses and investments in the local economy, and to develop a supportive entrepreneurial environment for economic development to thrive.
Blanca Surgeon of RCAC Santa Fe, Laura Dubin of the RCAC Santa Fe & Environmental Dept., and Jennifer Hazard with The CA Environmental Department facilitated the 6 hour workshop to setup the framework for future sessions.
Throughout the workshop, those who attended were separated into groups to identify underutilized ideas, skills, and assets of the Raton community. Collectively, the group identified and ranked the needed or desired visions for Raton, which included Raton to be an outdoor destination, as well as a destination location, and to attract more residents. The participants also mapped Raton’ s economical development history, and in turn, were able to identify the major trends and issues in Raton.
The facilitators then divided the trends into specific sectors that were to be discussed and used as a basis for the forthcoming workshops. From there, the participants identified possible outcomes that they hope to achieve throughout the workshop series. The outcomes were used to revisit the 8 forms of wealth and to map out the resources of Raton, both tangible and abstract to focus on the development ideas and identify the needs to increase established business, or to start a business to meet the demand.
The group of participants reviewed the 8 forms of wealth value chains that each group had created, and were given the task to answer the questions, “Who is missing from this workshop and not represented?” and “Who can be invited to attend next workshop” in order to create a sustainable and cooperative value chains. The next workshop in the series will be held on April 18th, 2019 at the Raton Convention Center. Register, and inquire with Patricia Duran, GrowRaton! Community Coordinator at (575) 224-6718 or Patricia.Duran@GrowRaton.org
