Partnership may be a lot more formal, they may have some kind of charter, they may have some kind of a governing council that meets the set objectives and carries out the activities of the organization. And the strongest form of partnership would be a collaboration in which you have stable membership, it's fixed membership that maybe our organizations have sign some kind of a compact and they agree to abide, they may share money, they may share personnel, in support of that organizations objectives. Normally collaborations will exist to serve long term objectives rather than something that's done for a few months or a few years, it might be a partnership that goes on over an extended period of time, over a period of years or even decades in some cases. So I think it's useful to think about those different kinds of partnerships and the closeness of the relationships that take place in them. When you think about partnerships, there's no right way to do it, it's just a question of what fits the circumstances that you're working with.

We commissioned a study, last year, of a series of collaboration efforts that were taking place in urban and rural areas of the United States. The study was done for us by the National Association of Community Action Agencies. They did a survey of 227 organizations and most of those organizations serve communities that are extremely low income, have high levels of poverty because that is the kinds of organizations that we are particularly concerned with. About half of the organizations that they looked at were in rural areas, and they define collaboration as mutually beneficial in well defined relationships between two or more organizations. And their results showed that most of those existed over a long period of time. What they found, perhaps not surprisingly, is that collaboration between organizations is something that is very frequently done between organizations working in the area of rural poverty. Because none of the organizations have enough resources to get the job done, they found it beneficial to pool their resources and work together to achieve common objectives. That also found that the organizations that were attempting collaboration, found the job of collaborating itself, a challenging job, not an easy thing to do but not beyond their ability to get the job done. While difficult, it was possible. They found that collaboration efforts succeeded most frequently when there was an active planning group that represented the different organizations that were a party to the collaboration, that was inclusive of all the organizations. And that it was set up in a formal way, it wasn't a half hazard kind of organization, but it was set up with a charter and formally designated membership. They also found that partnerships worked best when the coordinating group had the ability, had the power and also the political capacity to make decisions for all of the member organizations. When they were able to make those decisions and get through them successfully, they were much more likely to succeed in reaching the goals that they had set for that partnership. The other thing that was interesting about these collaborations, and they studied some 1200 specific partnerships in these 227 organizations, is that the member organizations themselves had to be willing to let the partnership have an effect on their own organizations. In other words, being in the partnership caused change in the member organization themselves. They weren't successful, or they weren't as nearly successful when the member organizations said we'll be a party to this, but we're not willing to let you have an influence on our business. We're going to keep our business to ourselves. The most successful ones were where the member organizations were willing to let that partnership help them evolve to something different. Before rural communities, one of the interesting findings was that the success or failure of partnerships was not affected by where they were located. In other words, small partnerships involving small organizations or rural organizations were just as likely to succeed as larger organizations, larger partnerships or those located in urban areas. They also found that successful partnerships take a lot time, they take a lot of resources and a lot of cultivation. Only a third of the successful partnerships had a consultant of some kind involved in them and so the conclusion was that while consultants may be helpful in building partnerships, they're certainly not essential. That local people and local organizations can build successful partnerships using their own skills and their own resources. One of the other findings was that most of the partnerships that started up, came about because there was some specific problem to be solved. People don't just go out and say, gee I think it would be a nice idea to have a partnership because I'd like to have one. Usually there is some kind of crisis in an area or a community or an area of interest, a community area of interest or a persistent nagging problem that may be getting worse that motivates pooling resources of organizations to do a job that none of those organizations is able to really address by themselves. And that's an important factor as well. That's one of the potential side benefits of a crisis is that it often does bring together people and mobilize organizations and people to do things that they wouldn't consider doing otherwise. And we often find in rural communities that crisis are really a stepping stone to long term improvements in the community, even though they may be short term disasters.

Now some of the significant challenges that these successful partnerships had to bridge to achieve their success, were learning how to manage difference between organizations and learning how to work together. And 74% of them said that was their most significant challenge. About ½ of them said lack of time and lack of funding to commit to the partnership was a significant challenge for them. About a quarter said pooling our resources and designing coordinated services across different service providers was a major problem. And the other things they cited were government policies and regulations that got in the way of the partnership. Difficulty in arranging transportation or bridging geographic areas where the partnership was across large territory, this would be a special problem in rural areas. And community resistance or simply lack of interest was also cited by some of the partnerships as a barrier to being able to succeed. The successful partnerships cited these success factors, one is a committed core leadership. That is the people who are at the center of the partnership, who are apart of the planning committee, the movers and shakers of that activity, have to be committed to that success and have to be willing to dedicate their time and their support to it. And 73% of them said that was a key factor in their success. About a third of them said specific focus on the process of working together as partnerships was an important factor also. It's kind of like a marriage or any other kind of relationship, it doesn't just happen, you have to work at it to make it happen and that same kind of thing is true of a partnership between organizations. And about a quarter of them cited having broad community involvement and community support was an important factor in their success. They also gave some advice based on their experience, to other organizations that might be seeking to perform partnerships. One was it's important to focus on the process of learning to work together across organizations. I think we've all seen examples of organizations that get in little fights with each other where jealousies arise and one organizations is concerned that another one is moving in and taking over some of their territory. Well it's really important to work at those kinds of things in order to make the partnerships succeed and that's apart of the advice they were giving. A second piece of advice was to set very clear and specific goals and expectations for the partnership. In other words, know what it is that you want to get out of it. Have some clear goals for what you want to achieve with the partnership and that helps you get there. Because then everybody knows why they're there at the table. The third thing is to be very persistent into trying to make the partnership succeed and to stay focused, especially during times of crisis, when the organization, the partnership may have a tendency to come apart. It's terribly important to be persistent during those tough times.

Now those are just some background findings about partnerships in general that arrive from that study. I'd like to talk about also, some specific examples of partnerships that we are working with in the Department of Agriculture. And I'll mention three of them. One is in the pacific northwest region of the United States, an area that has gone through significant economic restructuring because of cut backs in timber production that have resulted in employment loss and major change in the nature of the rural economies of the states of Washington, Oregon, and California, in particular. Second is the southwest border region of the United States. The area that borders between the United States and Mexico. An area that has a high concentration of American population of Americans of Hispanic origin and also high concentrations of poverty, particularly in that border region. The third region is the area of the Mississippi Delta and I'm going to talk more specifically about that. That region is historic slave holding area which has large numbers of African Americans living in it, many of whom are in poverty. Some of the factors in these regional approaches that we've taken to partnerships between communities on a broad multi state region, have resulted in some findings about what makes a successful regional project of that kind, a regional partnership. Some of those factors are in the case of economic development to recognize just how complex economic development is as a process. Typically, the economic development process is viewed as creating jobs by bringing in new factories or stimulating the creation of new businesses, or investing in critical infrastructure such as roads, water, sewer facilities, health facilities and other kinds of essential infrastructure.

But it's important to recognize, particularly in areas that are very low in income, that there are a lot more things going on in the economy than simply lack of infrastructure and lack of jobs. There will also usually be lack of hope, lack of education and job skills, often poor family structure, social disorganization, lack of leadership within the community, and so on. So what you really have is a whole complex of things that are mutually reinforcing. Strategies that try to address one or the other of those, without taking the whole picture, are almost certain to fail. So it's important to recognize just how complex the process is and then craft strategies that try to deal with the whole set of issues, rather than just the sort of so called silver bullet type approach where you pick one thing or another thing. The second is that to make these regional partnerships work, very broad collaborative partnerships are needed. That is they need to be inclusive of all the organizations that have the potential to contribute to the development of that region. It needs to go clear down to the community level and involve folks, plain folks, in the community who are affected by the development and who need to be a participant in it with larger organizations that may serve a particular community of interest or a certain geographic area with higher level organizations, typically governments or national foundations, or multi state area organizations of one kind or another that have resources or the capacity to convene people to work together on issues. And really all of them need to be involved through some kind of mechanism in order to make that partnership work. The third factor is the willingness to make a commitment to long term solutions. Solving the problem of a major restructuring of an areas economy, or dealing with historic problems in an area that go back decades or centuries in terms of the roots of those problems in social structure issues, means that you are not going to solve those problems in two or three years or five years or ten years. You really have to think in terms of decades or generations, perhaps, before you are able to eradicate all of the roots of those problems and allow a much greater level of equality in the performance of those economies and the lives of the people who are served by them. So you really have to think about going into these partnerships for a very long period of time to pull together those resources. At the same time, it's important to think about some short term successes. Nobody wants to get involved in a project when the only pay off is going to be 30 years from now because there aren't many of us who have that kind of time horizon that we're going to be patient to wait 30 years before we see the first success. So whatever you do, while you're keeping your eye on that long term goal, you have to create a series of wins throughout the process in order to keep people interested and focused on the fact that gee, something is happening, there are some results that are taking place. That's pretty important, we think. It's also important to look for new kinds of information that can help define the problem and identify possible solutions to the problem. Usually people in rural areas lack the kind of information they need to have to understand what's happening and why it's happening and what the alternatives might be for them. There are sources or information and it's terribly important to look for those sources and have people challenge your conventional views about how the problem may have arisen and what the outcomes might be if you chose to do something different. Universities are an excellent source of information, for example, to assist in the decision making process.

One of the things that we insist on is bench marking your activities, that is establishing some measures for how you know when you've succeeded or failed. Establish some indicators that lets you measure your progress so that you can tell whether you're achieving the results you want to or whether you're failing to achieve those results and over time, go back and look at those and ask yourself, is this what we want to have happen if not, what do we need to change about our processes in order to get a better result. We also think it's terribly important to learn from your experiences. Nothing is going to go the way you thought it was going to go. Sometimes things come out better and sometimes things come out worse. It's really important to admit your failures and then learn from those and then try something new to get over the problems. What we find is rural communities are really excellent sources of innovation and creativity and when they follow a process of learning from their experiences, they do a wonderful job without really very much outside assistance at all, in many cases. Keep your focus on things that are very specific and tangible. If you have vague goals you probably won't get there, but then you won't know whether you have or not since your goal might have been too vague to be able to measure in the first place. Authority and responsibility should be delegated to the lowest level possible. We really think it's important for citizens and citizens groups to be empowered to do as much for themselves on their own initiative as possible and have as little coming top down as you can.

Now I want to say a few words about the Mississippi Delta region and then Judy Gonanes is here from Texas and I think Judy would like to talk about the southwest border initiative as well. The Mississippi Delta, for those of you who may not be familiar with it, is located this would be New Orleans here at the tip and this is in the center of the United States and basically this region is 219 counties that are centered on the lower portion on the Mississippi River. A large part of this area was former plantation territory and the colors indicate the per capita income levels. Red being the lowest level of income between $5,000 and $8500 per person in 1985, a very low level. Basically, this is a very poor area, a high percentage of African American population areas that is characterized by historic discrimination and relatively little development that has gotten down to the level of the average person. It's an area that we want to give a great deal of attention to for precisely those reasons. This region was the subject of a study that was done in the late 1980s by the lower Mississippi Delta development commission and that study came up with a number of findings for kinds of investments and development that were needed within that region, but there's never been any implementation of that plan. What we now have is a new partnership that has come together in that region that involves people at the community level 8 rural and 6 urban empowerment zones and enterprise communities that are participating in the community empowerment initiative. Plus, a large number of champion communities. Champion communities are communities that went through a long term strategic planning process that was community based and involved widespread community participation by low income persons. They applied for the empowerment zone program, they were not successful in getting a designation, but because they had gone through that strategic planning process, gotten themselves organized and committed to long term comprehensive development, the Department of Agriculture has continued to work closely with them to build on the investments that they had made so that wasn't a wasted community process. And they are participants in this initiative. So what that gives us is a base of communities that are located throughout this 219 county region that have gone through strategic planning, that are organized, that have low income people participating in the program that are pursuing comprehensive broad based, economic and community development. So then we have the community, the bottom up portion of it in place. We also have engaged in this initiative, the lower Mississippi Delta Development Commission, which has inherited the mantle of implementing these region wide objectives that came out of the 1989 study. What we have done is marry those two together in this initiative. The communities have now met, they have begun work on a strategic plan that will combine the communities with the region wide approach. They have decided on a board structure and a charter and they're now in the process of organizing to begin working to partner these individual communities together the broader regional organization, so that they can pool their resources. Why do they want to do this? Well none of the communities wants to lose control over their own strategic plan. They have their own objective, they're different from one community to the other, they have similarities, but they're different, they're unique, they fit each individuals communities goals and objectives. And that's the way it should be. But one of the things they are finding, they're now three years into implementing their long term strategic plans, and they're finding that they don't have all the resources they would like to have. They'd like to pool resources. They'd like to share successes and failures with each other so that they can learn from each others ideas. They need a way to do that. They can see the possibility of some things that they could do better together, than separately . For example, tourism. A lot of them have thought of the idea of why don't we have a tourism sort of a heritage tour, throughout our region where people can take a driving tour and go from one community to another and make a little vacation to attract people to come to our region. Well that's not something that any one of them can really do by themselves, because they are small rural communities. They may something of interest to keep a person there for a part of a day, but most of them don't enough to keep the people in their community for three days let's say. But if you have a tour where you can go from community to community to community, then it becomes big enough to attract weekend visitors and so forth. Or two special festivals that may exist in one place and another place. So it's that kind of thing where they begin thinking about how can we partner with each other to make something bigger happen than what we can do separately. The same thing might exist between industries where an industry in a city was engaged in food processing for example, why couldn't the supplier of the agricultural commodities come from the near by rural communities. Why couldn't the boxes, in which the product is packed, come from some of those smaller communities that are around that city and so forth. So the idea of beginning to build an industry where the inputs are purchased from that local region as opposed to being purchased from some place half across the country, is often what takes place. It's that kind of thinking that can go on when you have multiple communities sitting down together and thinking about well we've got this and you've got that, gee if we put those together then we could, you know, we could do something that will be mutually beneficial. So that's the kind of thing that's taking place. Our role in this is really as a convener. We help provide technical assistance to them, we provide a framework, we provide actually fairly minimal amounts of resources to this effort. It's almost entirely locally driven. And really the initiative is taking place from them, but we're very proud to be a part of that process and to observe that taking place. The process, as I already said, was taking those community plans and building from them to the regional level. We think it‘s really important that the communities be in charge of this, so that the process is not a topped down process, it doesn't really work for the Department of Agriculture to say, this is the way you ought to do things, now everybody please do it the way we said. They're not going to do it that way, it doesn't make sense because we don't know what they want and they need to be making those decisions. But we do think it's important for them to expand their vision beyond the local boundaries to think about the broader region in which they exist because that provides a lot of potential opportunities to them. They need to take advantage of those and they need to pool their resources so that they can do more than they could do individually.

I wanted to say a few words about the empowerment process and then turn it over to Judy. The community empowerment process is a very different kind of program from the typical program that we have offered in economic development in the United States and I know that that's true internationally as well. The process involves the Department of Agriculture offering grant money to a limited number of communities. Flexible grant money that can be used in a wide range of purposes but only to communities that are very poor and only to communities that have agreed to and gone through a long term strategic planning process that involved community residents actively in developing the process, in developing the plan. When we did this in 1994 for the first time, there were 227 communities that applied for the program that went through this. We only had 33 designations that we could make so something like eight times as many communities applied for the program as were able to be designated. But one of the interesting things is that the application process itself was an important community development process for those that applied. For those that took it seriously, it was useful to apply even if they didn't get selected. And one of the things that we found was going through that process for these communities often built hope that something different could happen. It didn't have to be the way it's always been. When they did their plans, they created a vision and a strategy for how they were going to address the problems in their community that in the way that they chose to do that. Once their plans had been built, they then turned those strategic plans into specific, what we call benchmark plans, in other words, work plans, something specific that was actionable, that they could do. Then they set about the processes of finding resources and we helped them do that and they've been outstandingly successful in mobilizing resources through this initiative. And as I suggested earlier, they built in some early success, so that people in the community could see that it was really going to work, something was going to change and it would be different. And in the three years that they've been implementing their plans, they have made, well these 33 communities have created over 10,000 jobs already and they have trained 14,000 workers, they have taken 25,000 youth through youth programs. This is 33 communities and these are just little rural places, they're not big cities. So already we have taken them from sort of nowhere to a point where they are feeling a lot of confidence in the successes that they are able to generate. Now they are at a point where they are getting, levering resources from other places besides us. They are starting to think about changing their plans. Based on their experience, they are saying okay, we'd like to do something different now. This seemed good three years ago, but it doesn't seem so good now and we think it would be better if we did such and such. Well, we think that's really important for them to continue to do that. They're starting to think about doing different kinds of things. A lot of our communities, said our number one problem is jobs, jobs, jobs. We'll take any kind of job we can get. And they would often take really poor quality jobs because that was easily available and they were glad to have them. Well, after they did some of that then they decided, well we don't want just any job, we want jobs that are going to stay in our community. We want companies that are going to be friendly to our community and be a good citizen. We want jobs that are going to offer career track opportunities where people can advance. Where life will get better as people advance up the economic ladder in those companies. So they're starting to think about going after better quality jobs or jobs, not just jobs, but entrepreneurship opportunities where people can own their own business and be their own business manager and owner. That's the kind of shift taking place to, the way we use the word sustainable is a little bit different than the way it's used in sustainable agriculture. In our case, we're talking about sustainable community development practices which basically means, that if a community does them the community may be able to keep generating successes from what they've done over a period of time. Communities begin to spend effort building their own capacity to implement their strategic plan. They spend time on leadership development. They spend time building good relations between organizations within their communities so that they have a good solid base, organizational base, on which to do things within that community. That's terribly important. That's boring stuff. It doesn't sound like anything is happening to be honest with you, but that's almost the most important thing that goes on in this whole process, is building the ability to plan, implement a plan, to get results, to convince people that your little community has the capacity to do the job so that they are willing to invest in you. Those mundane kinds of things are really the most critical factor. The result then over a period of time, and our program runs for ten years, we invest in communities for ten years, and the idea is that we want to have a training program in which they can grow their capacity to do for themselves, can grow over a period of ten years so that by time they had gotten to the end of that, they will be successful on their own and we will go and work with a different set of communities and try to help them do the same kind of thing. So my closing remarks about this are if you are going to build towards linkages between urban places and rural places, and I think there are lots of opportunities, start at the community level. Don't start out by saying we're going to build urban/rural linkages, you really need to start at your own community level first and build up from there. Start with specific issues that you want to work on, work on those within your community, then expand to the larger region, find somebody else in other neighboring communities that are interested in the same kinds of issues, learn how to build a partnership with them to pool your resources, and gradually expand until you've gotten to the point where you are able to deal with the urban/rural linkages. Not something that you can do overnight, I think, but it's that kind of strategy that I think will be ultimately the most successful. Judy would you like to talk about the southwest border initiative because we've had some different experiences there.

I'll repeat the questions. The empowerment zone programs, that the 227 communities applied for, in some parts of the country. I'm sorry, your question was ‘Was there funding available for the planning process, who was involved in that process, and what percentage of them were women'. In some parts of the country, there was planning money made available, small amounts of money made available for the planning process. In the Appalachian region we have a multi state regional commission that provided I think five or ten thousand dollars to each of the communities to assist in their planning. In another region that's served by the Tennessee Valley Authority, which is in the mid section of the country, there was technical assistance in strategic planning that was provided, but no money. There were foundations, private foundations that provided some small amounts of funding in some cases, but in most instances the communities funded their own planning activities, funded their own organizing activities. Some of them hired consultants to help them with their strategic planning process. Some of them went to places like the extension, the Cooperative Extension Services, Agricultural Extension Services, to get people loaned to them to help or they went to local governmental planning commissions to donate some technical assistance for the process. As to the percentage of women that were involved, I haven't actually seen statistics on it so I can't say, but I will say, it's a very high percentage because we were encouraging active involvement by citizens in the process. There were a large number of public hearings that were held and some of the meetings that I have been a participant in we're seeing extremely large participants of women. I would say approximating anywhere between 30% and 60% depending on the meeting. Our communities, a large number of them have women in significant positions of leadership, I don't know what the numbers are Judy, but the Executive Directors, maybe a third or so. So it's certainly of our empowerment zones that's the case. So it's actually been quite inspiring. Yes.

Okay. Two questions, I think one has to do with what role the Department of Agriculture play in stimulating the community planning process and the second question has to do with how is it we were able to get funding for a ten year period of time given the much shorter political cycles that we have which run on two and four year time periods in this country. I'm not really sure, I'm answering the second question first I guess, I'm not really sure why we were able to get that through. I was not engaged in the legislative portion of it, I sort of got in the program after it was enacted. I do know that our president was specifically interested in this program and it has been one of his, it's not one of his most publicized initiatives, but it is one that he has given a great deal of personal attention to. And I would have to say that President Clinton's personal leadership probably had a great deal to do with the long term period of time over which this runs. This is a unique program in our experience, I know of no other program in this country that has ever run over a ten year period of time like that and it is absolutely one of the critical factors in the success. Now as to the public meetings, let me talk a little bit about what we are doing this year. This year is kind of funny. We're running a second round competitions this year. We have this time only five designations to make for this program and we have no funding right now. That is we were authorized to designate five rural empowerment zones in what we call round two by the end of this year. And so we are currently running a national competition for the communities to go through the same kind of strategic planning process that they did four years ago. At significant investment on their part, in organizing, holding local meetings, there will be thousands of hours spent in each of those communities, going through this process of deciding what their goals and objectives are and then writing a rather complicated and lengthy strategic plan. We hope that there will be money appropriated by the congress later this year and we think that there will be. But because we believe that the program is important, we held a series of I think, 16 regional workshops around the country where we sent somebody from our staff to these local workshops, and believe me, for the last two months, our offices have been on the road, flying all over the country holding those. In addition to those, we have I think 47 or 48 state offices around the country and each of those state offices is holding, you know one or several localized meetings to provide specific technical assistance to the communities as the visioning and the planning process that they're going through. So the number of hours that we're committing to the process of getting the word out to the communities is actually, quite enormous from our department. We have a website that has information and that has been a Godsend to us in terms of the ability of communities, and peoples, and our own field staff to get information about this very quickly. We can get it out you know, on an hours notice, we can get information out and I have no idea how many thousands of people have downloaded this from our website for this program, but it's been great. As of now, as of this afternoon, we had I think 143 or 144 communities that say they are going through this process right now, even though there's no money. They're going to go through this process because they think it is worthwhile, because they think there is a chance that it will have some money and because they know even if there isn't any money, it's still useful to them because USDA has made a solid commitment to continue to work with them no matter what throughout this process. So that's sort of illustration of how that process is working this year. We think that there will be over 200 communities or we don't really know what the totals will be because some of them won't tell us. They think it's better to be secretive about the fact that they are doing this process. There are lots of other ones that we know are going through this process that just simply haven't registered with us at this point, so we think probably that it will be in the neighborhood of 200 again this time.

Each got 14 million dollars over the ten year period of time. So, for round one, they got it all in one clump and then they had ten years in which to spend it. There were three of those that were designated. The three empowerment zones got 440 million dollars a piece. The 30 enterprise communities got about 3 million dollars a piece so there's a major difference between the level of funding that they got. And this was a bit of an experiment to find out what's more important, the community development process or the money. At this point, I ‘d be inclined to say it the process is more important than the money. And I think a lot of communities that got no funding at all still come and say, gee, applying for this program was the best thing that ever happened to our community. You'd be surprised how many communities that will say that. Which will sound a little strange, but it's true. For round two, the five empowerment zones would also get 40 million dollars over the ten year period of time. This time they would get it in annual installments of four million dollars a piece over the ten year period of time. Unless congress decides to change that, and there's some consideration being given to scaling that back from 40 million dollars to something less than possibly using the savings to fund some additional enterprise communities so that we would have a larger number of communities that we could fund. And that's a possibility. Yes.

(Question inaudible)

Can you identify what community you are from? Okay, thank you. I hope everybody could hear that. It's always nice to have somebody in the audience agree with you. I wanted to give Judy an opportunity to talk because Judy is from our state office in Texas. She's the Associate Director of the state office in Texas and works a lot with the empowerment zone that we have in the Rio Grande Valley and also with the champion communities and the southwest border initiative. Judy?

I was kind of hoping that Norm would have a map so we could also illustrate where in the southwest United States I'm referring to, but I will tell you that we're talking about the states of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California. And that's the southwest border region. With so many common issues that we learned, and I will tell you how we got to that point. And Norm is very much correct and I'm glad that the lady here from Kentucky/Tennessee area attested to the fact that as a champion community, that your area was able to benefit from the strategic planning process because I have been involved now in the second round of promoting this program and had been making visits around the state of Texas and specifically the champion communities, and as we worked with, I worked with my local managers basically outline and find out how much money has USDA rural development, itself, invest in some of these areas. And once we started going down the list, we found that these communities who were very aggressive, were very aggressive in following through with the application processes, many times came to 3, 4 and 5 million dollars worth of USDA programs together. And so there is, I definitely see that success that has occurred in Texas. Now specifically in regards to the southwest border regional partnership, we too are looking at an initiative in which, number one it started when vice president Al Gore, a year ago, had come to Texas, we hosted and I say we because Texas along with the other border states, hosted this regional meeting. He challenged us to think about and to move on regional planning, regional coordination, regional cooperation. The base here is the fact that you had the empowerment zone, which is located in south Texas, which is where the conference was being held, partnered with the other communities from New Mexico, Arizona, and California that included both enterprise communities and champion communities. So right there, you already had communities that had already made a difference for themselves by putting those strategic plans together back in 1994. With that core group, the group came together and accepted the challenge basically. Since that point, here we are now in June of this year and are finding that we have had a succession of meetings since that point, among the that constituency, among those organizations and what we've done has been, first in our own states, myself of course in Texas, we met as a group and decided, what were the issues of concern for us. Education, job creation , public safety, public health, environment, those were the common, housing, the need for housing, the need for community development, those were some of the common issues that we had identified in our state. Once we met in October of last year, again as the four states, the other states revealed what their issues were. It turns out, they were very, very much in common. What also pulls us together is the fact that we are by national in a sense that we share also the border with Mexico. And so those communities that are along the US/Mexico border, while this meeting pertains just to US, we all knew enough from our experiences living in those areas that we share those common issues with our Mexican counterparts. And it's something that I would say to the future that we would like to see cooperation and this type of effort. But be that as it may and starting on the domestic side as far as the US side and what we can control or make some kind of effort on, is coming together in this effort. So, the process has now continued. We identified issues. Groups of people identified themselves as wanting to take on these issues. But first we decided how, what do we want to do as a group, how do we want to proceed. We started through the leadership of the office of community development. Victor Bascus who is not here, but Norm very ably representing the office, through the leadership of this group, they looked at other entities in the United States. The Tennessee Valley authority, the Appalachian Regional Commission, these are entities of the United States that have been in existence for thirty years plus, that have been cooperative efforts in states. To pull their leadership together and have ultimately received congressional authorization, as a separate entity, to receive funds. That's a tremendous emphasis there. The fact that they have funds that have been going to there four resources, their four attentions, and we are looking at a very similar type of entity for the southwest border region. But again, the difference here, is that it's not the government, even myself, you know as a government official telling the communities what to do. They come voluntarily. We're providing them with information and they're taking it upon themselves now to carry it through. That's the difference. So the organization now through each state has basically developed some leadership and we met again earlier this year in California, notice we've been in Texas, we've been in Arizona, we've been in California because we wanted everyone to have an opportunity to host a meeting. Again inclusiveness, again to the lady that was asking about women. The two co chairs, already right there you folks, y'all know that usually it's, Norm please, usually it's one guy trying to run the show, not this time. Its co chairs and they both happen to be women. The one empowerment own director from Texas and the enterprise community director from California. And we figured that way we've got the both big states covered. And we'll work with our friends from Arizona and New Mexico to bring it all together. So, where we're at now is determining what type of an entity. And this takes time, you don't just want to appeal and make big efforts or make big statements without having done your homework. This is again being done differently. And so that's why it's taken some time but, where we're at the stage now is deterring what kind of commission or entity, whatever structure it may be, to then unite ourselves as well as bring in obviously other partners. We can not do this by ourselves and gain again, inclusiveness of other governmental, of other community, churches, whatever the support may be to pull everyone together. So that's where we're at and as a matter of fact, there is going to be a white house empowerment zone conference, an empowerment enterprise community, champion community, and communities in a final notice of intent, in the middle of July here in Washington, DC. Part of the plan, because we are organized, again with this regional initiative, is to present our findings to the point to congressional delegation of the staff and members of congress that represent those four states. Obviously, you've got to appeal to our elected officials and they need to know what the communities are doing to prove themselves. So without, as you can tell I'm real excited about it and have been real thrilled to be a part of it from this perspective as far as USDA and providing technical assistance to the communities, that's what we do and again it's up to them on a voluntary basis to accept the challenge. Any questions or any comments? I guess Norm, we're open just to overall general statements. Has this prompted any thoughts for people here? I hope it doesn't sound too impossible because again, it's sort of taken step by step and it has been through a different way of operating in which community people have come together. She was my luncheon friend so I'm glad to see you here.

The question is as I've been stressing is the fact that's it's been through very much a voluntary nature in the sense that communities themselves speak up for themselves, and they, the leadership in these communities, don't get me wrong, they are coming from low income areas. You know part of the issues that I was describing in regards to the US/Mexico borders the fact that you've got counties with high unemployment and all the other attributes of areas that you know, when you have low incomes and all the problems that are associated with that, that's there. And it does vary. In regards, it's a challenge. I'm not saying that this is simple, because for example having gone through round two again, as far as Texas, we hosted a meeting. We had the meeting up in Amarillo, Texas which is in the panhandle of Texas, way north. And the question was in regards to, someone else also asked about organizing in a sense. What we try to do is get the word out to everybody as much as possible. And rely on word of mouth, rely on newspaper coverage, rely on just passing information on to elected officials and community groups and so forth. But you're right. It does make the job a little bit easier if you've got someone to take the ball and run with it back in that local area. What I have seen in regards to rural development, whenever you have an area that you know has a very specific problem that you're not seeing leadership being generated, anyone taking responsibility, because we can't do it for them is that what we try and do is fortunately, we're organized in which we have a manager of an office basically. Someone to go out representing the agency to then meet with a variety of people to inform them about what the issues are. And see within that way, through appealing to their conscienceness, of conscientiousness I should say, of their community to then maybe pull a group together, I'm not saying one persons got to do it all, but that's organizing. I mean organizing is not easy. That is part of the technical assistance general theme and then there's many specifics to it, but technical assistance in a broad way. Norm is correctly pointing out that we have plenty of publications, of informational material, I commend Norm again, and the staff of our office of three development because they put a lot of really good information out. The web page, I'm telling y'all, y'all really need to take a look at it and access it because there's many things to think about. And it's, as you know web pages you can drop on so many different topics and then go from there. So take a look at the web page and then also there's publications within our office of community development.

I was asked about what the address was on the web. It's www.ezec.gov and that will get you to all the information. www.ezec.gov. I believe there was a question in the back?

Well I think that the issue is that we're trying to keep track of everybody. Okay.

Thank you. There was a point up here that was made in regards to what about in areas where there is language barriers. Or language, I'm not going to say barriers, but in a sense for a need for a bilingual to represent or to provide this technical assistance and you're absolutely correct. I know what in regards what we have responsibility for as far as USDA, we have some bilingual staff. And if a person locally could not basically handle the issue in that forum, then we can contact someone, I am bilingual myself, so I could always assist, and I've done it. You know as far as Texas.

The question was in New Mexican, Arizona, and actually Texas, we have Native American. If there's any work done in the Native American communities, the answer is absolutely yes. I know for a fact the Arizona State Director, my counterpart as well as New Mexico State Director, have done significant amount of work in working with Native American communities. As far as Texas, I personally visited two of the Native American communities that also happen to be along the US/Mexico border and so there you have issues where you've got three languages going on, so I did my presentation in Spanish had someone translate in their particular Native American dialect, and we conducted our meeting. And fortunately now have been able to provide some USDA services in those areas. Not to say that the problem is solved. It's a tremendous amount of need.

I just want to say a comment about the reservations. When we did our first round of competitions four years ago, the congress said that the land included in reservations was not eligible to apply for our program. That's because of a specific provision in law at that time that gave tax benefits to the reservation lands. For the second round of the program, reservation land is eligible to apply and we're finding that large numbers of tribes, which retain some measure of sovereignty under our legal system, they're almost like sovereign nations in some respects, like this particular program because it allows them to develop according to the cultural model that they want to pursue rather than having us say you have to do it a particular kind of way. So far in the round two competition Judy, I think we've got about 25 tribes that have, out of the 140 some that say they are applying, there's about 25 tribes that have already declared themselves and we know that there are others that are working on it that just simply haven't told us yet.

Well the question has to do with non recognized governmental reservations whether this applies to them or not. Basically under the law that governs our second round of this program, there is no part of the territory of the fifty US states that is not eligible to apply. So regardless of legal status of the tribes, they will be able to participate in this program as long as they meet the other qualifications for eligibility.

The questions about changes that have take place in these zones over the last four years.

Thank you, and I guess everyone heard the question in regards to results. That's what that is, that's what the lady is asking. And fortunately I've had experience working very closely with the zone in Texas. Number one, one of the big changes is that you have communities working together. As opposed to against each other, as opposed to bad mouthing each other, as opposed to competing against each other, again, this is not easy and the reason I say that is because the zone that was designated in Texas for example, comprises four different counties, in the along the border. And I know, I used to be a lobbyist before I was in this job, so I used to see a lot of their representatives come out here to Washington, to individually lobby on behalf of those cities. And you know that there's so much in common there and it's very ironic when you hear about, well we don't want basically our neighbor down the street or down the road to, you know, get this funding, and you want to say wait, wait, wait. So that is number one to me. Is that you have communities working together and it's not just elected officials. That's the other big, big difference. It's not just the chamber of commerce's, which usually are the ones to rah, rah on behalf of a community. That's a huge difference. When I meet ladies, I'm going to say this, ladies who are coming from the Alonia, as in very low income neighborhoods in south Texas, and when we first took Alonia there in south Texas, it pertains to areas which have no infrastructure, water, sewer, electricity, you know any kind of services, but yet people want a piece of the rock. They want to have their land. So therefore, by hook or by crook, they go out there and they live in these areas and ultimately communities are established but have very, very little infrastructure. But, you've got tremendous leadership, you have tremendous amount, you know families, women who you know, who want to make a difference for their communities. A lot of these women are members of the boards of the subzones. As I mentioned, four counties, so each one of those counties has their own subzone board. Which they themselves develop the projects. They are the ones that make those proposals to for change, whatever it may be. And I'll give this as an example. There's one I think a tremendous example that has occurred in the Rio Grande Valley in which one of the major needs was a need for health care professionals. They were finding that in the local hospitals people were soliciting from out of state, even quite frankly, out of the nation, to have health care professionals to come in to serve in those hospitals. Well it was decided among the empowerment zone board and community that why can we not train our own, train our own folks here. And that's what they've done. They've started a project called ‘Vive' vive meaning life in Spanish. And they put together this training program and in cooperation with the hospitals and so that you don't have, that's also as you well know been a criticism of training programs, get them trained and they have nowhere to go, no jobs to go to. Well this time, make a linkage with those local entities so that those graduates can then be referred to those local hospitals for example. I've seen another example in which micro enterprises, through a the one stop capital shop, which has been established there in the University of Texas Pan-American, the point about universities is very important because they are an important partner here. You need to have the education for the future as well as now. And I've seen examples in which micro enterprises are now being developed, local seamstress coming together in a cooperative manner. So there have been results. Again, just a change in the sense of business as usual, that funds are basically there are funds going to communities, they spend the money and it's gone. Well what about results and again it's a struggle but little by little it's happening.

Do you want to please come forward? Great. A representative here from the Yakima Valley I'm assuming? Great. Now I'm residing in California but I came from the Yakima Valley in Washington state. Two of the cities there, communities there, Grand View and Sunny Side, won economic communities status three years ago. As a result of that, well one of the things that happened almost immediately with them, is one of the major employers went out of business. So that wasn't a real major plus for them except for the fact that because they had gone through this strategic planning process, they had pretty much started empowering themselves already. And as a result of that, they felt that they could go out and market this building that was going to be available, because the business had got out, it was a food processing plant, they were able to market that plant, that building, and within 9 months they had another employer back in the community. In addition, they were able to start attracting public trust fund money so that they could build and expand their sewer so that then they could attract more businesses to their area because when you're processing food it takes a lot sewer capacity. They were also able to attract community development block rent funds so that they could begin doing street improvements, and lighting improvements, sidewalk improvements, infrastructure type of things that were all on the part leading into the community, which they felt would start giving that community a better face, a better image to anyone coming there. The Yakima Valley, and Sunny Side and Grand View, are in the middle of what's now called wine country in Washington State. And so now they are attracting, they are on wine country road, and they are attracting a lot of visitors to the area and so they wanted to have a good face that they would present to the public. And so through these infrastructure improvements they were able to start doing that. Now they are engaging, or nearly completed with housing, a strategic housing assessment. And it wasn't just Grand View that went through this, this was also Sunny Side. Grand View and Sunny Side have always been football opponents, basketball opponents. They have traditionally not gotten along and they never want to meet together and cooperate. And in fact they've battled with each other for years over transportation and infrastructure and other kinds of dollars. Well, in this case they had to do their planning for housing together. And the first people that were involved in that said it was a one on one process, housing process that was a one on one and now is going to be marketed throughout the state. Because it's such a good process for working together in communities. And they are going to share their dollars, their rehabilitation dollars, and their housing development dollars. So they've made great strides and they are also sharing the same person is who is overseeing this, coordinating all of these efforts with the community residents. So they're on their way, they've attracted a lot of dollars to their community and they are able to show immediate successes and wins and they're getting along much better than they have in the past. I want to point out that Sunny Side is relatively urban and they always like to ignore their Hispanic population and Grand View has been more rural and they have been embracing their Hispanic population and now the two are having to work together and it's been good for their minority population which is rapidly becoming the majority in this area.

There are lots of other good examples of things that have gone on in the communities too. Another one that I would like to point to is the Mississippi Delta empowerment zone. Which is in the Mississippi Delta region that I showed you the map. That is an area in which there are historic black/white differences in the community. The black population, having come from a former slave population, the white population many of them from former slave owner populations, and the racial divisions within that community have really prevented any kind of productive development that would engage the whole community. One of the things that happened as a part of this planning process in that community, is that leading organizations, one representing the white power structure, another of which was a civil rights organization they represented the African American population, came together and said we're going to form a partnership and we're going to continue to work closely together to bridge this gap within our community because we know that until we are able to do that, we will not be able to bring out the advancements in the community that will benefit the population. And they have formed a partnership, a historic partnership, between two organizations that were really quite opposed to each other that has been very tight throughout the last several years and continues to be very tight. They made a long term commitment to say we are going to make this work and we now have a much improved climate for community discussion in which everybody is recognized as having a place at the table for the dialogue to go on. And I can't tell you how the discussion has changed, the tone of the discussion has changed, to say everybody belongs in this discussion, we're all community residents, we all have something to contribute to this, we all deserve to benefit from it. Just an enormous change in the way that the whole development process has gone on within that community. So it's hard to measure those kinds of things, I can't give you numbers but the program really has helped communities get through some very difficult kinds of things and I think it's setting a climate that's going to let them continue to improve over time. Yes.

Well thank you. I want to say that we really believe in this program. We think it's, I've been in this business for almost a quarter of a century and this is absolutely the best thing that's ever come along in the period of time that I've had the privilege of working with rural communities. We're thrilled. We have dozens of people like Judy around the country who are equally committed and thrilled to be apart of this process and I think Judy would attest to the fact that having this program helps us energize our own field personnel to do the kind of community service that we really want to see happen. We have a very good product to deliver right now and that helps us engage our folks in a much more people friendly way. And I think it's been enormously helpful to us.