A community development meeting was recently held in Jefferson that brought together several entities to share ideas of how to better work together.

Greene County Development Corporation Executive Director Ken Paxton says the meeting involved GCDC, the Greene County Chamber and Tourism, Bell Tower Community Foundation, Greene County Extension, Greene County Medical Center, Greene County School District, Greene County Board of Supervisors Thomas Jefferson Gardens and several city councils. It was led by Sandy Ehrig, who is the economic development administrator for Iowa Farm Bureau and the former Jefferson Area Chamber Director.

Paxton explains why the meeting needed to be held, “The problem is we’ve got a lot of organizations with a lot of effort and a lot of projects, but we haven’t had an awful lot of coordination. Everybody is working towards the same goal kind of in their own path. So the purpose of the meeting was to how best we can coordinate all of our multiple assets to kind of move all in the same direction towards community development.”     

Paxton adds that Ehrig leads sessions like this around the state and she uses Greene County as an example of how to get things done when entities work together. Paxton says they want to keep that leading edge and one way to do that is by keeping one group of individuals involved.

“I think it’s really critical to mention that we have a young base of community leaders who are extremely active. They started with Vision 2020 (program), they went into the school bond issue to get the (new) high school passed. They’ve taken over in many of our projects and that’s really important because we’re growing this community for them so they need the input.”

Paxton notes each entity is going to continue to meet and coordinate their efforts on projects as they come up.