Site formed to promote region

There’s a new tourism website promoting East Central Indiana.

Jay County residents have a chance to be actively involved with its outreach.

Forge Your Path, a talent attraction website created by the East Central Indiana Regional Partnership, is looking for local residents who are interested in volunteering as ambassadors — guides who can provide visitors with information on a more personal level.

“Through this name, Forge Your Path, it’s almost like a call to action. We want people to feel like they can get engaged in their communities and really help make changes and transform their small towns and communities,” East Central Indiana Regional Partnership  president Mindy Kenworthy said.

The website — forgeeci.com — launched in early September as a way to promote East Central Indiana to visitors. East Central Indiana, which includes Jay, Blackford, Grant, Madison, Delaware, Henry, Rush, Fayette, Wayne and Randolph counties, has experienced population decline for years. East Central Indiana Regional Partnership wanted to create something to change those statistics, Kenworthy explained.

“The ultimate goal is to try to keep people here and attract new residents,” she said. “Some people might be surprised that we’re targeting current residents as a part of this initiative, but … we want to try to instill a sense of pride in living in the region, for people to be proud to say they live in East Central Indiana,” she said.

Visitors to the website can browse information about each county, like housing, employers, events, famous residents and local trivia. Interested visitors from outside the area can fill out a form online to contact ambassadors. Each visitor will be paired with an ambassador who can share information about parts of the region they’re interested to learn about. Once selected, volunteer ambassadors will be in touch with visitors via email, text or phone, or can set up an in-person visit. 

The new website is also is a place where local residents can go to learn more about the community. Caitlin Hancock, the regional partnership’s director of administration and marketing, noted that the website is for everyone, even those who have lived here all their lives or for many years, because there could be information they don’t know.

“We definitely think that people here can learn a lot more about where they live,” Hancock said. “I hear that often, where people say, ‘Oh I didn’t know this existed in a certain county,’ and so we definitely want to help spread the word to our current residents.”

East Central Indiana Regional Partnership formed in 2005, and economic development has changed drastically since then, Kenworthy explained. In the beginning, most of the organization’s work focused around attracting businesses to locate in one of the 10 counties. But about five years ago, it became more heavily focused on engagement with community efforts and talent attraction.

“That was all driven primarily because we were starting to look at very low unemployment rates,” she said. “There was a gap — our existing companies were having a very difficult time finding people, especially skilled people.”

This caused economic development groups to modify their missions. East Central Indiana Regional Partnership started to act more like a marketing organization, 

“We were already marketing 10 counties for business investment, we could easily use some of our resources to start marketing to attract people in addition to businesses,” Kenworthy said.

Every year, the organization puts out the East Central Indiana Livability magazine, which focuses on the quality of life in the region. About two years ago, though, Kenworthy realized there was more ECIRP could do.

That’s when Forge Your Path came into play.

Tourism bureau representatives from across the East Central Indiana region met in May 2019 to brainstorm ways to tackle the declining population. The group created a task force, Elevate ECI, with representatives from each county in the region. Elevate ECI and graphic design company IronGate Creative of Hagerstown worked together to brainstorm, and months later, Forge Your Path was born.

“It was kind of like a region-led initiative from the very beginning,” Hancock said, noting the input from each county.

Both Hancock and Kenworthy hope to get more input from local residents about the website.

Those interested in becoming an ambassador or sharing their thoughts can send an email to [email protected] or search Forge ECI on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram. There will also be a webinar Oct. 14 for local human relations professionals and employment recruiters and Oct. 15 for area realtors, home builders and lending officers. These webinars will explain more about the tools available for promoting the region.

In relation to current events, COVID-19 has made living in highly populated areas difficult, Hancock noted. Kenworthy said she think it’s a great time for the website to launch amid the pandemic because smaller communities are safer and less crowded. Both Hancock and Kenworthy hope the effort will drive more city dwellers to rural East Central Indiana.

“A lot of the smaller towns in the region have struggled,” Kenworthy said. “Sometimes people, especially young people, I think like to be a part of something bigger. They may not be able to make that same impact in a large city … but they could move to one of our small to mid-sized cities or rural communities and really get involved and make a difference.”