A 500 Families Partner:
With sound fundamentals, we take action to improve
Percentage of
jobs that are
production,
transportation, and
material moving
12.0%
United
States
Indiana
When you live through a natural disaster and look past the debris,
you see in contrast
a blockade of media
trucks with their huge
By Laura Coyne
logos and satellite decks.
The crews scurry out
Elkhart County
Government
to interview, analyze,
pronounce,
package,
and move on. But that
single event lives on
in digital files, community reputation, and local pledges of coursecorrection.
Five years and a roller-coaster ride ago, MSNBC covered our
economic tsunami. Its immersion-level “Elkhart Project” still lives on
the Internet:
“Diversification is easy to talk about, but it’s not easy to bring about,”
said Bill Johnson, who several years ago led an effort called The Horizon
Project that aimed, in part, to draw a more diverse group of businesses
to Elkhart County.
The hard truth, many say, is that making an economy less reliant on
one major industry can take a decade or more.
- Associated Press archives: http://bit.ly/1ftjTEg
Making. Doing. Bringing about. These are action words.
To make headway, our actions have to be stronger than
the diminishing purchasing power and economic
monoculture continuing to hold jobs, families
and companies vulnerable. That is the level of
determination with which the Greater Elkhart
Chamber launched its 500 Families initiative.
An element of new talent