How can the BVI help your community?

The Business Vitality Initiative has a lot to offer. It serves as a business and community analysis of needs, issues and capacity, which some communities have used to understand and set priorities for action. These actions have included such priorities as accessing funding from government and foundations, as well as learning to support future community economic development ventures.

CIEL Unlike other community economic development processes, the BVI does not cater to specific groups but strives to include everyone. CIEL also recognizes that many communities are worn out by long consultation processes and complicated research reports. The BVI Team engages the community in focused, productive meetings and produces a web-accessible Assessment (full and summary) and Final Reports, and offers many other elements that make it a truly unique process.

Some of these elements include:

Giving a community the skills to understand their own opportunities & challenges
Creating community “buy in” to work on identified actions
Bringing in an outside group that provides unbiased opinions
Creating a safe forum for community members to give honest feedback/suggestions
Using cutting-edge research to measure a community’s business support capacities
Helping a community create their own, tailored action plan
Comparing findings to similar BVI communities to highlight community strengths
Delivering the report findings in an accessible & easy-to-read way
Preventing blame of community leaders for present community challenges
Facilitating realistic, achievable, timely actions for communities

The Business Vitality Initiative gives communities a relevant assessment of its ability to support and expand its business growth. Equally important, the CIEL team uses the assessment to work with the community to offer short, medium, and long term actions – the basis for developing a Community Business Action Plan - to encourage vitality, prosperity and entrepreneurship.

If you are interested in learning more about how the BVI will benefit your community, please contact us for more information.

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