TJ Partnership authors development plan

For Michael Harvey, director of the Thomas Jefferson Partnership for Economic Development, success is measured not in days or weeks but years.

Harvey is in the process of designing a five-year comprehensive plan for economic development in Charlottesville and Albemarle, Culpeper, Fluvanna, Greene, Louisa, Madison, Nelson and Orange counties.

Harvey’s plan, due to be finished in September, will focus on seven areas with development potential: workforce, existing businesses, research, project management, communications, business attraction and entrepreneurship.

“We want to focus our resources in the areas that are going to yield the highest return,” said Harvey, who became the partnership’s director in March 2007. He said that 80 percent of the partnership’s resources, which total $400,000 a year, would be put toward existing business development.

Harvey has taken a novel approach in the plan’s design. Using the “ownership model,” Harvey confers with business owners and members of the community, his “rain makers,” to identify key challenges and opportunities, and use their feedback in addition to research to create action items.

“My philosophy is, focus on what you’re good at and try to build critical mass in those areas,” he said.

Harvey started designing the comprehensive plan in June. The plan will incorporate the initiatives of the Future Forward plan, another 5-year plan created by the partnership in 2005.

Several other new programs will act as a foundation for the plan, Harvey said.

The Information Center, which was completed in October 2007 and continues to be updated, gives new and expanding businesses access to demographics and community profiles. It can be publicly accessed on the partnership’s Web site.

This year the partnership became the fiscal and administrative agent for two other organizations, the Small Business Development Center and the Workforce Investment Board.

The SBDC became a full-time program in January and moved into a partnership-sponsored office in May, just down the hall from the partnership in the Omni Hotel. The SBDC’s service area of Albemarle, Fluvanna, Greene, Louisa and Nelson counties was expanded to include Orange County.

SBDC director Nora Gillespie gives free counseling to businesses with fewer than 100 employees. “We run the gamut, from the time they get into it to the time they decide to get out of it,” Gillespie said.

The partnership will also act as a conduit between employers and the Workforce Investment Board, a federally funded program that focuses on training and building the workforce, enabling the partnership to connect employers and employees.

“These are the types of creative initiatives that we’d like to explore further,” Harvey said. “I’ve just started drilling down.”