21 Windham Region Towns Vote to Support SeVEDS Municipal Funding Effort for fy 2024
21 Windham Region Towns Vote to Support SeVEDS Municipal Funding Effort for fy 2024
Each year, Southeastern Vermont Economic Development Strategies (SeVEDS) asks voters in Windham Region towns to invest in regional economic development efforts at the level of $3 per resident. This year, 21 communities, representing 86% of Windham region residents, voted to support the SeVEDS municipal funding effort, resulting in an investment of $114,000 in regional planning and economic initiatives.
Funding requests for fiscal year 2024 were approved at Town Meetings that spanned from early March through mid-May in the towns of Athens, Brattleboro, Brookline, Dover, Dummerston, Guilford, Halifax, Jamaica, Londonderry, Marlboro, Newfane, Putney, Readsboro, Rockingham, Stratton, Townshend, Wardsboro, Weston, Whitingham, and Winhall, with the Wilmington Select Board separately approving a request from the Town’s 1% fund.
For a grassroots organization like SeVEDS, this level of support is a critical metric. Broad municipal funding helps create a regional approach, with programs that can take on economic and community development issues beyond the scope of a single municipality to address on its own. Importantly, the annual funds raised by SeVEDS are not simply plugged into program development and delivery by affiliated organization Brattleboro Development Credit Corporation (BDCC), but are also leveraged 5-20 times as collaborative municipal support is matched by philanthropic, private, state and federal dollars, and funding from BDCC revenues.
SeVEDS grew from a broad-based regional effort, initiated by BDCC in 2008, to understand and create the long term strategies needed to reverse the economic decline of the Windham Region and plan for the economic impacts from the closure of the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant. In 2014, after multiple years of regional input, education and data gathering, SeVEDS received federal approval for the Windham Region’s federally recognized S.M.A.R.T. Comprehensive Economic Development Strategy (CEDS). SeVEDS subsequently partnered with Bennington’s Regional Economic Development Group in 2018, and received a federal funding match to develop the 2019 Southern Vermont Zone CEDS.
