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Community Development

Community development is a large field that includes economic development and other practices aimed at forging and strengthening social ties to improve people's lives. Community development empowers individuals and enables local governments to undertake a wide range of activities intended to create suitable living environments, provide decent affordable housing and create economic opportunities. An occupation as well as a way of working with communities, community development tools can be applied in health care facilities, libraries, schools, social services organizations, cultural institutions, and housing developers to promote growth, cooperation, and inclusion.

TRORC works in community development by helping towns to address these issues in their local plans, writing and administering grants to plan and implement projects and through partnerships with other organizations and agencies. TRORC participates in the Vermont Community Development Association (one of our staff is the current President of the Board), which is a large group of many interests in community development throughout the state. We also work with our economic development partners - Green Mountain Economic Development Corporation (our regional development corporation), our many Chambers of Commerce, and local development corporations.

The Comprehensive Economic Development Strategy (CEDS) is a continuing economic development planning effort that enables the East Central Vermont region to access public works grants from the U.S. Department of Commerce, Economic Development Administration (EDA).

TRORC works with Vermont business owners, developers, lenders, and other professionals involved in "environmentally-challenged" real estate transactions, called Brownfields. We provide these professionals with resources to successfully transact and redevelop Brownfields using grant funding from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

TRORC assists member towns in applying to the Vermont Downtown Program for downtown or village designation, which provides technical assistance and training to communities for their downtown revitalization efforts.

Tourists contribute significant amount of income to the state economy. In 2005, visitors made more than 13 million trips to Vermont and spent more than $1.5 billion on goods and services, providing about 12% of all jobs in the state and contributing $196 million in revenues for state government.

For more information on how we can help your community, please contact Peter Gregory at 802-457-3188 or email pgregory@trorc.org.

Grants

The main source of grants for communities in this area is the Vermont Community Development Program. Funds can be used to plan and implement projects that help people with low and moderate incomes, including housing, jobs, handicapped-accessibility, and community facilities. For more information go to:

http://accd.vermont.gov/strong_communities/opportunities/funding/vcdp - Open in New Window

 

In This Section

Broadband

Brownfields

CEDS

Community Development

Downtown & Village Designation Program

Economic Development

Tourism