Sam: Awesome chance for Lake City

Deputy City Administrator Sam Taylor comments re: Coeur d’Alene’s chance to win a $250,000 Blue Cross of Idaho High Five Community Transformation grant:

I want to share with everyone how awesome this opportunity is. Bear with me because it’s long but I’d love to bring you into the process since we just had a great meeting with the awesome Blue Cross staff this week and with all of our partners.

While the City has to be the main sponsor of the overall grant process, this whole thing really is driven by a collaborative group that begins with CDA 2030, our independent community visioning organization. From there, they put together a partnership with the Inland Northwest Food Network, the University of Idaho, the Kroc Center, Kootenai Health, the Coeur d’Alene School District and more. Should we win, the grant will be administered by one of these entities (most likely CDA 2030 or the Inland Northwest Food Network, though Blue Cross of Idaho has now offered to hold the funds and disburse based on a planning process I’ll note below).

The beauty of this grant is they’re actually not requiring any community to say explicitly how we want to use the funds at this time. They really just want to gain perspective on our challenges (thus the video) and see how much community support we have (clearly a lot here, where more than 3,000 people participated in our community visioning process through CDA 2030 and helped us build a health and safety goal through that).

Should we win, Blue Cross will be with us hand in hand for the first six months, doing site visits, reviewing all of the assets we have available for potential or current programs, see if there are other partners to bring into the fold and we’ll work on a strategic plan to outline the programs and offerings that best fit Coeur d’Alene.

It’s one of the most unique grant processes I’ve ever seen and they’ve done it this way based on what they learned from their first round of grants three years ago. They didn’t want to force anyone into a box right away.

It’s a huuuuuuuge opportunity for our community and we are all excited to be considered. Just being in the Top 7 is a great honor.

You can vote for community of your choice by clicking on this link here.