Grow new/emerging green businesses and green jobs through targeted assistance and new workforce development.
Best Practice of this action
Rating Guideline
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Provide incentives such as targeted loans, grants, streamlined permitting processes, shovel-ready land parcels; participate in coordinated marketing and business assistance efforts, or provide similar support; actively support women- and minority-owned businesses; use/conduct a sustainable jobs and workforce capacity assessment. |
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Provide or link businesses to incubator space, local/MN suppliers, or other tangible assets; explicitly encourage (new) businesses that implement sustainability measures. |
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Utilize an economic gardening approach; support the creation of co-operatively owned businesses (report retail food co-ops under action 27.4); develop workforce training opportunities with community colleges and job training centers to credential, for example, energy auditors. |
Resources
- See, for example, the financial assistance program Minneapolis conducted to remove all perc-based (toxic chemical) dry cleaning machines at private businesses.
- Minnesota Main Street, a program of the Preservation Alliance of Minnesota, provides participating local Main Street organizations with the training, tools, information, and networking they need to be successful in their downtown revitalization efforts with businesses.
- Made in Place: Small-Scale Manufacturing & Neighborhood Revitalization (Smart Growth America: 2017) presents the opportunity of small-scale manufacturing to grow local entrepreneurship and to revitalize downtowns and business districts. Small-scale manufacturers include breweries, furniture makers, textiles, local food production, 3D printing. By integrating manufacturing businesses into downtowns and other existing neighborhoods instead of locating them in industrial parks or standalone facilities, communities can build the character, appeal, property tax benefits and success of walkable neighborhoods.
- E2 Entrepreneurial Ecosystems promotes the business development approach called economic gardening that aims to add one new job to each of 50 existing businesses rather than luring one new business with 50 jobs to relocate in town. In a related effort, the Project for Lean Urbanism is a combination of streamlining regulations and coordinating efforts of property owners and residents, so as to accelerate small-scale projects. See also USDA Rural Development Rural Business & Cooperative Programs.
- Business retention and expansion strategies and assistance from the Univ. of MN Extension Center for Community Vitality, whose goal is to build local leadership and social capital in support of local economies.
- See energy career, training and job links from Minnesota State Colleges and Universities.
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