Wyoming Products

FOR RELEASE:
June 2, 2008

Tom Lacock
Senior Marketing and Public Relations Specialist
Wyoming Business Council
Office: 307.777.2834

Wyoming Rural Development receives national award

CHEYENNE – The Wyoming Rural Development Council has been presented with the 2008 American Society for Public Administration Public Integrity Award. The award pays tribute to the organization that has made outstanding contributions to responsible conduct in public service by accomplishing a project or program that benefits the general public.

Wyoming Rural Development Council (WRDC) Executive Director Mary Randolph received the award on March 10 in Dallas. The WRDC was honored for its Community Assessment program. The objective of the community assessments is to provide experts in economic and community development to assist rural communities with locally conceived and driven development strategies. The process can be summarized as a program that provides communities an affordable process to assess their problems and challenges, identify their assets, and to define issues and projects that they would like to achieve, with hopes that this will lead to long range planning.

The Wyoming Rural Development Council has facilitated community assessments to nearly every Wyoming community and is now offering the program to counties in Wyoming, as well as revisiting communities five years after their assessment. The program has nearly 500 trained volunteers for the resource teams with extensive experience in the areas of community and economic development, land use planning, affordable housing, conservation, healthcare, tourism, transportation, infrastructure and many more.

David W. Sears, acting assistant deputy administrator for the US Department of Agriculture nominated the Wyoming Rural Development Council. In nominating the WRDC, Sears wrote: “Under this program, the Wyoming Rural Development Council offers small towns a multi-disciplinary team of outside experts (from the public, private, and non-profit sectors) to assist the community in looking at its resources and planning the best ways to harness those resources to achieve its vision of a better future. This program has made a huge impact across rural Wyoming!”

The mission of the Wyoming Business Council is to facilitate the economic growth of Wyoming. For more information, please visit our Web site at www.wyomingbusiness.or

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