You Can’t Hire an Economic Development Director Anymore.

You Have to Grow One.

The market for experienced Economic Development Directors is empty. Stop waiting for a unicorn to move to your town.

We provide the executive framework to develop your existing staff into the leaders you need.

View the Fellowship

No Unicorn is Coming.

You have an empty office. You have a budget for a mid-level salary. And you have a stack of resumes from people who have never closed a public deal. You can keep waiting for the "Perfect Candidate" to move to town. Or you can look down the hall.

You likely have a Planner, a Clerk, or an Assistant who knows this community inside and out. They have the trust. They have the capacity. They just lack the Executive Discipline of Economic Development.

The Economic Development & Placemaking Fellowship

The Senior Partner

Shane Farthing (JD, MPP, LEED AP; Principal, SF&A) serves as the Senior Partner to your staffer. He provides the strategy, the templates, and the weekly oversight to ensure the department is running correctly.

The Framework

We don't teach theory; we install an operating system. Your staffer undergoes 8 months of intensive professional development, mastering the laws, institutional norms, policies, financial models, and communication skills required to execute the job.

The Deliverables

This is a production environment. Your staffer creates your Site Inventory, Incentive Policy, and Strategic Plan as their primary coursework. You get a trained Director AND a year's worth of foundational community-based economic consulting work.

Return-on-Investment from Month 1.

By the time your staffer graduates, they will have produced the following assets for your community under our supervision:

  • A forensic baseline report of your local economy, including SWOT analysis and asset platforming.

  • Learn to discern your community’s most compelling assets, and how to leverage and promote those assets internally and externally to support economic goals and improve quality-of-place.

  • A federal funding proposal: the opportunity identified. The opportunity discovered and understood; the program designed and budgeted; the narrative drafted; the grant submitted for consideration.

  • A framework of existing and proposed, actionable policy and incentive alternatives to support the community’s sustainable attraction, retention, and support of what it wants.

  • A pragmatic roadmap for the department.

Build vs. Buy

The “Import” Model

  • Recruiter Fee: $25,000.

  • Relocation: $10,000.

  • Salary Premium: +/-$120k/year.

  • Risk: High. Outsiders leave in 18 months.

The "Growth” Model

  • Fellowship Tuition: $23,750.

  • Relocation: $0.

  • Demonstrate investment in your people.

  • Risk: Low. You invest in talent that is already rooted in your community.

Shane Farthing & Associates

Shane is Principal of Shane Farthing & Associates, LLC and Director of the Trauma-Informed Economic Development Institute (TIEDI).

Shane has directed economic development programs; led economic advocacy initiatives; developed policies and programs netting hundreds of millions in resources for communities; revitalized hundreds of acres of blighted industrial brownfields into contributing places; and led programs to bring communities together in pursuit of shared prosperity.

He loves working in small communities where one-on-

one relationships matter most. He established the SF&A Economic Development Fellowship to help towns stop losing momentum or reinventing the wheel every time a Director leaves.

The SF&A Economic Development & Placemaking Fellowship provides an action-oriented curriculum and public-centered accountability structure to bridge the gap between "Potential" and "Performance," giving you a system to build lasting economic and community development capacity from within.