Commissioner Burroughs appointed to One Marshall County Steering Committee

Thursday, April 11, 2024 at 3:27 PM

Linda Yoder from One Marshall County appeared before the Marshall County Commissioners last week.

Yoder is the Executive Director of the Marshall County Community Foundation and United Way of Marshall County. Her visit was seeking the appointment of a representative to serve on the steering committee.

On February 15th the County Council held a work session to learn about One Marshall County. The presentation was about an hour in length and then the question and answer and comment session were about another hour in length.

Yoder's appearance on Monday, April 1st was to update the commissioners on the work of changing from Stellar to One Marshall County. She said, “We are working toward a more cohesive and efficient team. We believe you know many of the projects we’ve been working on via Stellar and other grants that we’ve received.” As a reminder, Yoder said it was the County Council and Commissioners who reached out to recruit a team to work on the Stellar Initiative back in 2016 or 2017.

Being designated Stellar brought in $33.7 million of investments in the county and since then, as a community, we have had the opportunity to participate in READI 1.0 dollars, and now READI 2.0, a Lilly Endowment through the Indiana Economic Development Corporation and Lilly Gift Seven and Gift Eight funds to the Community Foundation for the regional planning by Stellar and Crossroads Committee.

Yoder said during a strategic planning session about a year ago they realized there was more they could be doing, more efficiently and cohesively with the assistance of a full-time position. All this prior work has been done by volunteers, but the community can’t expect volunteers to keep working long-term. This past year the committee has spent organizing to create a new entity under One Marshall County.

Yoder then asked for an appointment to serve on the steering committee from One Marshall County. She said the appointment could be one of the commissioners or someone that they wanted to appoint to the team. The commissioners appointed Commissioner Mike Burroughs to be their representative.

Yoder said the committee is hoping for financial support in the future.