'Growing Greene' now on Facebook

In 2007, Greene County was chosen as one out of nine pilot communities to participate in the Indiana HomeTown Competitiveness (IHTC) program for 2008.

(For more background information, visit

www.gcedc.us/Development/News and click on Aug. 22, 2009 -- Indiana HomeTown Competitiveness for the full article.)

Since then the Greene County HTC steering committee comprised of representatives from the Greene County Economic Development Corporation, the Greene County Foundation, the Purdue Extension Office, Linton-Stockton Chamber of Commerce and local communities have been involved in this initiative.

In July 2009, the Greene County HTC steering committee along with Jerry Frye of the Greene County Council and Kermit Holtsclaw of the Greene County Commissioners, traveled to Columbus, Ind., for the IHTC Annual Meeting. At this meeting, we had the opportunity to meet with other pilot communities as well as first year HTC communities and learn what they were doing with the program to customize it to fit their community.

We then decided to come up with our own HTC brand. This process, however, was a lot more time consuming than one would think. We had to determine a common purpose and a name that would appropriately define that purpose.

Thus, Growing Greene County was born. To grow has several different definitions and we thought this was appropriate as we try to resolve these key issues in our community: communication, awareness, marketing, independent financing and youth retention, to name a few. Everything we would like to accomplish falls under the umbrella of the four (now five) pillars discussed in the August ED Insight article mentioned above; youth, philanthropy, leadership, entrepreneurship and now we've added tourism.

Greene County has a lot to offer visitors and tourists. The problem is we don't see it because we aren't visitors or tourists; we are Greene County. We need to see ourselves through the eyes of a visitor or tourist and ask ourselves "are we attractive to them"? By attractive I mean, not only does the county look esthetically pleasing to passers through, but are we as Greene County residents attractive? Do we exhibit stellar customer service, are we friendly to those we've never met and/or seen before, are we willing to do whatever it takes to market our community to get folks to want to visit and find out what we have to offer?

I'm not sure we as a community could honestly answer yes to all of the above answers. Partly because I don't think "Greene Countians" really know what we have to offer in order to promote tourism or fully understand how tourism could benefit Greene County from an economic development standpoint.

The Growing Greene steering committee has explored several avenues to promote county wide communication, from creating yet another website to surveys to articles and so on and so forth. Cam Trampke, Greene County Foundation and I discussed starting a Facebook page for Growing Greene County. The purpose of this page is to allow folks to post events, activities, festivals on the page to get the information out there. Believe it or not, when visitors and tourists travel to our county, they travel all over. So if the Apple Festival is going on in Bloomfield, folks in Linton and Jasonville need to be prepared for "outsiders" to check out their community as well. It's called county wide communication and it's a beautiful thing when it works!

Please find us on Facebook and learn what Growing Greene is all about. Together we can put Greene County on the map and make it a destination for travelers. Join us in our efforts to bridge the gap in Greene County!

"There was that law of life, so cruel and so just, that one must grow or else pay for remaining the same." -- Norman Mailer

Brianne is the administrative assistant for the Greene County Economic Development Corporation. She can be reached by mail at P.O. Box 7, Linton, Ind., 47441; by telephone at 847-4500, and by email at bjerrels@gcedc.us .