Chief Strategy Officer, Lex Dennis, explains the unique challenges of creating impact in a new community.
enFocus Jul 31, 2018 · 5 min read
Why Elkhart County?
We received funding from the Lilly Endowment to create meaningful opportunities for recent graduates. In our original submission for funding through the University of Notre Dame, we planned to expand into another community. I think the move towards Elkhart County happened for two primary reasons.
- The timing was right. With the regional Cities initiative happening three years ago, there was clear momentum toward regionalism with partnerships forming between St. Joseph, Elkhart, and Marshall Counties. We realized we could be a part of this push toward regionalism by matching talent with purpose on similar projects in Elkhart County.
- We had developed key partnerships. Specifically, we created a strong relationship with Dr. Pete McCown, the president of the Community Foundation of Elkhart County. He said that there could be a potential subsidy for our work in Elkhart County, depending on how quickly it developed.
Two and a half years ago, we started trying to identify projects in Elkhart County. We initially started by thinking of projects we executed in St. Joseph County and pitched potential sponsors in Elkhart County with the hopes of replicating these efforts. This messaging didn’t give us much traction in the community. Then one of our Board members got up at a community event with Elkhart leaders and said:
Raise your hand if you have a kid that graduated from college. Now, keep your hand up if your kid is now living here in Elkhart.
Everybody’s hand shot down. I think that was a clarifying moment for us. Regardless of which projects we pitched, we needed to be more intentional about our core purpose—attracting and retaining talent in Elkhart County.
Establishing a model in Elkhart County.
After finding limited success in pitching individual sponsored projects in Elkhart for about a year and a half, we decided to change tactics. With support from the University of Notre Dame and the Community Foundation of Elkhart County, we made the decision to deploy me to Elkhart full-time last May. My strategy was to find people that believe what we believe. Reflecting on how enFocus started in St. Joseph County, it was really the Board members and their initial connections, but more importantly, their understanding of the community problem sets, that allowed us to dig in and begin working back in 2012.
In Elkhart, my strategy was the same — to find people that believe that talent is central to economic development, and then allow their connections and their understanding of community issues to lead us to potential projects.
Seven projects resulted from this approach: one with the City of Elkhart, one with the City of Goshen, one with Elkhart County, two with the Convention and Visitors Bureau, one with the Elkhart Economic Development Corporation, and one with the System of Care coordinators.
Project with the Economic Development Corporation.
One project that could be very influential for the entire county is the project with the Economic Development Corporation of Elkhart County (EDC). The EDC project centered on a three-part economic study:
- The first part is laborshed, which is borrowed from the ecological term watershed. When the rain falls, where does it collect based on geography? Laborshed is a similar concept–we analyzed the location of employers versus the employees’ home addresses.
- The second piece is barriers to employment. What’s stopping people in terms of vertical mobility within current employment? What’s keeping people under-employed? What’s keeping people unemployed? What are some of the barriers to prosperity?
- The last piece is an employer needs assessment, which gathers information on what skill sets employers are going to need tomorrow, a year from now, or five years from now.
We spent a lot of time making sure that there was statistical significance by studying different random sampling methodologies. We decided to put out 10,000 mailers that advertised a prize for completing the survey. We received over 600 responses to that outreach, comfortably exceeding a five percent confidence interval.
The exciting thing for our team was that we got the opportunity to dig into some of Elkhart County’s most pressing problems: the labor shortage and the incredibly high turnover rate that plagues the manufacturing industry in the County. We helped make sense of these anecdotal problems by putting data behind them.
The strategy is to convene employers and service organizations around the results of that analysis and say, given what we found, what strategies can we adapt to address those issues? There are a lot of implications from a community development and betterment perspective, and we are excited at the opportunity for enFocus to be a part of ideating solutions with employers and partner organizations.
One region, two enFocus sites.
When we planned our site in Elkhart County, the eventual Fellowship and internship model we developed reflected the county’s population and demographic needs. However, we truly see this as a regional effort because so many of our projects span geographic boundaries. We frequently travel between St. Joseph County and Elkhart County on the same day as we go about our project work.
My big goal for this year was to create an infrastructure in Elkhart that would allow us to experience explosive growth in the years to come. We have an executive committee in Elkhart that governs our actions; we have an office space; and we are now established with seven community sponsors.
Takeaways from one year in Elkhart County.
One of the coolest things about Elkhart is how collaborative the county is internally. For instance, the Horizon Education Alliance (HEA) is a service organization that focuses on identifying and implementing different sorts of education programs in Elkhart County. All seven superintendents meet once a month through HEA. That inter-connectivity is really cool. At enFocus we feel we can help provide that same brand of inter-connectivity by working with sponsors across industries
At enFocus we feel that we can help provide that same brand of inter-connectivity by working with sponsors across industries, in the private, public, and social sectors to address community challenges.
The entrepreneurial spirit in Elkhart is a part of the community’s DNA. The “we make things” mentality is evident through the success of the RV industry. I think an interesting opportunity for enFocus will be finding the best way to tap into this entrepreneurial ecosystem. How do we best pair eager young Fellows and interns with industry experts to craft bold ideas for the region? That is a question for us in the coming year, and we are looking forward to working with our Elkhart County partners to find the answer.
Empowering talent to build better communities