Rural Empowerment Zones and Enterprise Communities: Best Practices 1999

Excerpts from the Executive Summary: This compilation of best practices, drawn largely from the 1999 annual reports of rural Empowerment Zones (EZ), Enterprise Communities (EC), Rural Economic Area Partnership (REAP) Zones, and Champion Communities (CC), represents a collection of good ideas that have been tested in practice. It differs from traditional compilations, which frequently describe effective ways of addressing particular social and economic challenges, such as business development, housing, health care, job training, and transportation. Because this volume is concerned with the process of community empowerment—a very different and more comprehensive objective than attacking individual programmatic challenges—its focus is on ways rural communities have chosen to achieve empowerment for themselves. As a result, the practices shown below are organized around themes that reflect some of the issues that must be addressed to achieve community empowerment: Administrative Capacity --- Building Sustainable Programs --- Citizen Participation --- Combining Funding Sources --- Creating and Celebrating “Wins” --- Governance --- Leadership Development ---Monitoring and Evaluating Strategic Plans --- Partnerships.