WABASH VALLEY, Ind. (WTWO/WAWV) — Regional leaders gathered at the Wabash Valley Community Foundation Tuesday morning, to unveil their West Central Indiana Regional Community plan.
They are describing it as a collaborative road map that will improve economic development, infrastructure, and quality of life.
Beth Tevlin, President and CEO of the Wabash Valley Community Foundation, said the main focus of their plan is education.
“I hope that you’ll be seeing, from organizations like ours that are grant making organizations, funding for quality-of-life initiatives”, Tevlin said. “Education is incredibly important, so you’ll be seeing scholarships and funding for early childhood education.”
To fund these ideas and projects, the community foundation is working on an unrestricted Lilly Endowment Fund.
“A donor will give funds to the community foundation, we invest those funds, and then each year we distribute the earnings back on those funds to support programs and projects throughout the community”, Tevlin said. “Lilly Endowment has challenged us with a two for one. If a donor gives us a dollar, Lilly Endowment will give us two dollars.”
Vice President of Regional Engagement for West Central Indiana Partnership, Josh Alsip, said local leaders coming together means larger projects are able to get done in the future.
“We have to do all of this behind the scenes work that often times takes multiple years and is nitty-gritty in some respects, but that’s what leads to the really exciting stuff down the line”, Alsip said. “Over the next year, two years, five years, I think that will really spur us to see additional investments that we haven’t seen on this level before in West Central Indiana.”
The Wabash Valley Community Foundation said it will share social media posts, continue to put out a monthly newsletter, and host large events as they put the plan into action.
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