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Tribal Economic Development: Building with Strengths and Confronting Challenges Tribal economic development is a difficult task. It's more than simply providing jobs. Couple tribal political pressures for growth and pressures to work with certain companies with tribal community needs for jobs and other kinds of development and the difficulty of the work is only heightened. But what exactly is economic development and how might tribal economic developers most effectively go about trying to achieve it? This is a central challenge for tribal community leaders and economic developers alike. This booklet offers insight into these challenges by highlighting economic development efforts of tribes and lessons they learned over the last 10 years and through the millions of dollars of economic development assistance provided by the federal Northwest Economic Adjustment Initiative. In 1993, the Clinton Administration launched the Northwest Economic Adjustment Initiative as part of the Northwest Forest ("Option 9") Plan. The Initiative and Plan came in response to the declining timber industry. The Northwest Economic Adjustment Initiative was designed as a region-wide economic development strategy to help rural areas weather reduced timber harvests and a changing timber industry in the Pacific Northwest. A total of $1.2 billion in federal funds was made available to tribes and non-tribal communities through a competitive application process between 1994 and 2000. Forest Community Research evaluated the success of the Initiative, visiting communities and interviewing community members and agency personnel to discover what projects resulted in positive economic development outcomes for rural communities, and what projects had been less successful. A total of 35 communities—including six tribal communities—were examined region-wide. In order to capture a diversity of tribal experiences and accurately depict lessons learned by the tribes, we examined six tribal communities that varied in size and scope. The Intertribal Timber Council supported the production of this report in order to highlight key economic and community development lessons for Indian communities. This report is divided into five sections. The sections following the Introduction are Integrating Economics and Natural Resources, Initiative Programs Designed to Assist Communities, and the Conclusion: Working on Challenges While Building with Strengths. We conclude the report with a brief list of resources. Final Tribal Economic Development Report (PDF)
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