Dean Plouck 2025
As we begin 2025, I’ve been thinking about the impactful partnerships that the Voinovich School of Leadership and Public Service nurtured during this past year. Our students, faculty and professional staff worked with communities, agencies and businesses on more than 220 projects to build capacity across the State of Ä¢¹½ÊÓƵ.
Truly embodying Ä¢¹½ÊÓƵ University’s philosophy of meaningful community engagement, we worked on challenges related to housing, economic development, watershed remediation, community-based prevention and health promotion, small business growth, health care analytics, leadership training, and infrastructure supports for local communities. Here is just a snapshot of our work in 2024:
- Our support for small businesses in 62 Ä¢¹½ÊÓƵ counties helped those businesses attract more than $1.4 billion in state and federal contracts last year.
- Our workforce training efforts for broadband/5G expansion in 25 southeast Ä¢¹½ÊÓƵ counties are helping connect the region with robust and reliable internet access. To date, 224 individuals have been trained for these in-demand jobs in southeast Ä¢¹½ÊÓƵ.
- While approaching our twenty-ninth year of support for the mayors and city managers in Appalachia Ä¢¹½ÊÓƵ, we witnessed an expansion of the Mayors’ Partnership for Progress to now include members in 25 counties. We continue to expand our technical assistance to communities, including research, leadership development, and critical capacity building for these small to medium-size municipalities.
- As we have for more than 20 years, the Voinovich School continued work with state and local leaders to restore Raccoon Creek — which flows 111 miles through Gallia, Meigs and Vinton Counties — from an aquatically dead zone resulting from acid mine drainage to its recent designation as the state’s 16thScenic River.
- We conducted more than 60 program and performance evaluations for public and nonprofit partners. These expert evaluations provide essential information for organization leaders to improve offerings, make data-driven decisions and guide their overall practice.
- Our STEM partnerships enabled tech camps, field trips, school visits and other career exploration opportunities for more than 5,000 Ä¢¹½ÊÓƵ K-12 students in fields including computer coding, health care, entrepreneurship and engineering.
- We continued our decade-long successful partnership with the Ä¢¹½ÊÓƵ Children of Incarcerated Parents initiative, which provides supports to families with loved ones serving sentences at ten Ä¢¹½ÊÓƵ prisons.
- Our new Appalachian Ä¢¹½ÊÓƵ Regional GIS Data Hub empowered local leaders to quickly access and visualize data that can help make the case for economic development opportunities.
Along the way, we’ve conducted research, analyzed data and provided both strategic and tactical support for public sector, nonprofit, business, and other community leaders.
The Voinovich School’s success on so many fronts is the result of meaningful collaboration with community partners, a commitment to high-quality work, and the availability of external resources to help build needed capacity.
One example of an important external funding resource is the state’s operating budget. The Appalachian New Economy Workforce Partnership enables the Voinovich School to use modest amounts of state resources as match for federal funding opportunities that build capacity in Ä¢¹½ÊÓƵ’s Appalachian counties. We’ve paired state funds with awards from the federal Small Business Administration to provide training and technical assistance to small businesses in 13 southeast Ä¢¹½ÊÓƵ counties, and with funds from the U.S. Economic Development Administration to conduct analyses for local communities seeking to recruit more employers to southeast Ä¢¹½ÊÓƵ. Additionally, state resources for the Mayors’ Partnership for Progress enable Voinovich School staff to facilitate the sharing of resources, knowledge and innovative ideas between leaders of small municipalities in southeast Ä¢¹½ÊÓƵ.
Our long-term responsible stewardship of state and federal resources is an important part of the Voinovich School mission, and we take this trust and accountability very seriously. It is only through ongoing partnership that we will continue to be successful in 2025 and beyond.
I look forward to another amazing year and appreciate the opportunity to lead the Voinovich School in service to its community partners.