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June 2020 Updates
Hello, Forward Wayne County Partners!
This month's Forward Wayne County newsletter includes a look at our Dashboard, ways our school systems and children persevered under pressure, updates on projects, and some news on community endeavors. Please continue to support the initiatives that speak to you and share this information with friends, family, and colleagues.
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Big Five Indicators
We are excited to announce the launch of the Forward Wayne County Big Five Indicators Dashboard. This is where we'll track our progress towards achieving our goals. The Big Indicators of Success by 2025 include:
- Achieving a population of 66,101 for a year-over-year increase of .05% for five years
- Raising Per Capita Personal Income and Median Family Income to be equal to the state average
- Decreasing the percentage of residents living in poverty to be at or below the state average
- Increasing to 35% of the population, ages 25-64, holding an associate degree or higher
- Increasing Grossed Assessed Value annually at a rate at or above the state average
These metrics measure how close we are to attracting, developing, and retaining a highly competitive workforce to meet the current and future needs of our area's businesses and industries. The Dashboard also reinforces some of our Guiding Principles: specifically, our commitments to encourage and use data-driven decision-making and deploy "turn the curve" thinking tactics when needed to improve performance.
The Dashboard will be updated as our coalitions mature, so be sure to continue to check in to monitor our progress.
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Making a Home in Wayne County
Retaining our recent graduates from trade programs and higher education is an important step in reducing population decline. To do this, we have to be a place worth putting down roots - and that requires some key features. One young professional published an article on the reasons she chose to call Wayne County home. To read her article, click HERE.
Feel free to share this post with the young people in your life to help them see the benefits to living in Wayne County. If they need a little more convincing, show them the Career Pipeline (below) so they can examine income outlook for the professions we need in Wayne County. |
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Wayne County Resiliency
COVID-19 threw us a curve ball as we headed towards the end of the 2020 school year. The typical events we take for granted were postponed, if not cancelled entirely. Kids looking forward to the last semester of their senior year were thrown into a virtual world and plans for graduation – caps and gowns, handshakes and hugs, and crowded auditoriums – changed radically. Despite all of this change, parents and the dedicated faculty and staff of our local schools worked to ensure these precious milestones were still celebrated in Wayne County style. To read more about how we celebrated graduation, click HERE.
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We had nearly 2,000 graduates from our local colleges. Our goal is to have 35% of our population aged 25-64 possess an associates degree or higher. We're so proud of the Class of 2020!
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We Need Your Help
Do you use social media? If so, we need your help to spread the word about all the good things we're doing in Wayne County. Over the last six months, we've grown our Facebook following by 28% - and we want to do even better than that in the next six months. Be sure you're following us and invite your family and friends to follow our pages, too. Help us by liking posts that you think are important and join the conversation by adding a comment to share your thoughts or tag a friend who cares about these issues, too. Click on the icons in the footer below for a direct link to each of our social media platforms.
If you don't use social media - that's okay! There's another way you can help: share our newsletters with your friends, family, and colleagues. Forward this email and encourage them to subscribe.
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