AdvantageWest Announces Future Plans

AdvantageWest plans to suspend operations by the end of this year, but its programs and initiatives are expected to live on.

They will continue thanks to the help of other nonprofit entities in the region, allowing the organization’s work to continue making a positive impact long into the future.

The announcement comes two years after the state announced a new model for economic development, thus eliminating its annual appropriation to AdvantageWest and the six other regional partnerships across North Carolina.

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The AdvantageWest board and executive leadership has been working for months to identify like-minded partners who could sustain key initiatives such as Blue Ridge Food Ventures, the Advantage Opportunity Fund, and the Certified Entrepreneurial Communities® program, said W. Thomas Alexander, chairman. Negotiations are underway and will be announced in the near future.

“From the time we learned in 2013 that AdvantageWest would be losing its funding, our goal has been to do everything we could to keep these programs alive. I can now say with confidence that we’ve found the right partners to make that happen. And even though AdvantageWest as an organization will be suspended by the end of this year, I’m proud that we’ve been able to successfully continue operating AdvantageWest long past what many predicted, given our funding challenges.”

Among AdvantageWest’s recent successes has been a contract award from the U.S. Small Business Administration to develop ScaleUp WNC, a program focused on assisting high-potential existing small businesses scale up and create quality jobs. The first year of the program ends in September. One of only eight entities across the country to be selected for this pilot project, AdvantageWest is working with SBA on a transition plan to ensure this program continues to benefit the region through the remaining four years.

AdvantageWest is also in the final stages of several agriculture, natural resource and outdoor industry development initiatives through the WNC AgriVentures grant, awarded by the U.S. Economic Development Administration, Appalachian Regional Commission, and U.S. Department of Agriculture in 2012. That grant program ends in September and AdvantageWest will continue to see those projects to completion.

The nonprofit organization, which has served the 23 westernmost counties since its establishment by the North Carolina General Assembly in 1994, will be leaving an impressive legacy – to include everything from helping bring corporations like Google and Sierra Nevada Brewing to the region, to assisting with projects like “The Hunger Games,” to serving as the first economic development organization in North Carolina to develop programs focused on entrepreneurship and on the green economy.

AdvantageWest is a 501(c)3, nonprofit regional economic development organization serving the westernmost counties of the state, a geographic region of about 10,000 square miles or about the size of the state of Maryland. For more information, visit www.AdvantageWest.com or call (828) 687-7234. AdvantageWest is on Facebook at www.facebook.com/AdvantageWest and on Twitter at @AdvantageWest.