Over the last five years our region has made incredible progress in establishing a shared understanding of the systematic changes necessary to build a 21st century talent pipeline. This work is not exclusively focused on a single demographic of our community, rather the GPEDC supports the development of strategies aimed at empowering individuals from cradle to career, from K-12, to recent college graduates, and career-seeking adults. Along with numerous incredible community partners, Greater Peoria is well ahead of the curve on workforce development and there’s no slowing down.

Our work is aligning to new college and career readiness expectations from the State of Illinois, this includes implementing new career pathways frameworks, expanding Early College access, and creating more opportunities for students to gain real work experience. The largest piece of our career pathways work is CareerSpark, our regional 8th grade career expo, co-hosted by the GPEDC and Junior Achievement of Central Illinois.

We’ve also continued expanding our talent attraction and retention efforts focused on recent graduates, Peoria expats, and career-changing adults through targeted events and marketing. We are also engaging both recruiters and jobseekers though our revamped Talent Connection initiative.

A business’s growth or loss impacts more than just the community in which it is located . It impacts the regional supply chain, workforce and community services.  Work with experts and stakeholders from the public and private sectors to identify appropriate strategies to support sustainable and robust economic growth.  

Greater Peoria EDC programs such as Elevate GP, Foreign Trade Zone #114, GP Manufacturing Network and IL Defense Industry Network provide businesses with resources to ensure resilience and growth.

With a yearly goal of 100 business visits, we aim to help regional companies formulate their best possible plans of action to grow, innovate, and overcome obstacles. 

Along with this strategy of company engagement, we also work to help develop the regional resources and incentives to maximize success for these companies. This includes work on EDA grants, Enterprise Zones, and revolving loan funds, all of which help foster an environment where regional companies are supported to continue growing in Greater Peoria. 

A key opportunity for attracting investment to the region is to raise awareness of the region’s assets and business strengths. There is room to improve the local, national, and international knowledge of all that Greater Peoria has to offer.

With that understanding, we have begun to document and market the assets and strengths on which to build. We will articulate the resources we need and want. And collectively, we will work together to accomplish those goals. As we publish, build relationships and raise awareness, there are 3 target audiences for communicating our efforts.

Our first audiences identified were the gatekeepers who advise companies on location decisions including Site Selectors, Consulates, and decision makers around the world. This outreach occurred through networking events in Chicago, targeted trips to direct flight destinations, business attraction trips through contracted organizations and online outreach efforts.

The second primary audience identified are local stakeholders and business leaders. The more local people are engaged, informing and in the know about the assets we have, the more people will be singing our praises and the more attractive our region will be. These efforts began in 2019 through local stakeholder meetings, participation in the Business Champion Group and Big Table Efforts, and storytelling efforts about local companies.

Our third primary audience for Business Attraction efforts are Peoria area alumni who have fond memories of the community through parents, teachers, alumni associations and more. This audience matters to business attraction because they have ties to the area and new networks to leverage for building relationships with the area. We began cultivating this audience through the Peoria Area Homecoming Event and LinkedIn networking. We will continue developing communication strategies with this group.

These efforts alongside prompt submissions to site searches through Intersect Illinois, TBIC and personal networks will help us continue positioning ourselves as a quality region for investment.

Greater Peoria is an innovation hub in the Central Illinois region. It is the quintessential all-American city because of its representative demographics and mainstream culture. Resultantly, it is one of the country’s leading test markets for new products, services and experiences.

Immersed on meeting the market’s burgeoning needs, the region’s startups respond by creating innovative solutions to underserved and new market segments. Entrepreneurs validate assumptions with customers locally and scale up through strategic partnerships across the United States and around the world.

These value-added solutions create wealth and economic growth that ripples outward across the region; to its investors through gains and dividends, to service providers through new lines of business, and to employees through the jobs created.

Building on Peoria’s unique identity, startups and small businesses contribute significantly to a sense of place for the region. The Greater Peoria Economic Development Council is honored to serve and assist the region’s founders and owners in their business ventures.

Over the past year, the Startup Greater Peoria program has reached people in the business community at all levels, from students to mid-career professionals considering entrepreneurship as a career pathway, to business owners and others starting a new business as their second or third careers.

In 2019, we ran 2 cohorts of a small business accelerator program, a 9-week program focused on equipping small business owners with the practical knowledge on how to start and run a business. In addition to hosting a number of business and entrepreneurship meetup events at the Nest Coworking, e.g. 1 Million Cups, Javascript and Open Data Analytics, we also engaged with Bunker Labs, a veteran entrepreneurship organization, Bradley University’s Engineers in Entrepreneurship club as well as the Public Relations program in the Faculty of Communications to co-host events for veterans and women business owners respectively. Collectively, we have engaged with more than 200 founders, innovators and community members in the region and facilitated over 170 resource connections. For 2020 and beyond, we continue to engage with the business community and to support a number of them on an ongoing basis.  

Our goal is to  increase participation by the numerous communities in our five counties in regional initiatives for workforce development, entrepreneurship and innovation, business development, and  business attraction.  Additional attention is given to the agriculture community to increase on-farm diversification and innovation and develop regional agriculture supply chains, and involve our numerous agriculture stakeholders in the process of innovation and to build a more inclusive entrepreneurship ecosystem.

Through outreach and events our rural program aims to build greater partnership and collaboration simply by increasing communication and creating systems for the exchange of ideas and relationships.  Beyond creating this marketplace of ideas, this approach also helps our organization identify specific projects where we can provide technical assistance (such as grant writing services).

The network leverages the individual strengths of companies across the region to create opportunities to grow a more diverse customer base. Regional suppliers and service providers who have a diverse customer base are better able to withstand downturns in any one industry. More business also leads to investment in increased capabilities and more employees.