No need to embellish here on grant application

It is always interesting to me when two different areas of my job intersect at the same time. I recently had this experience while working on a housing grant and participating in a workforce development activity.
For most of the last year and more extensively over the last few months, I have been working closely with the Aurora Housing Development Corporation (a partner organization of Aurora Development Corporation) to apply for another rural workforce housing grant. Aurora first received this grant in 2021, which helped create a $2 million revolving loan fund for housing. Leveraging these funds, Aurora was able to support the development of 59 new lots for housing, build 10 single-family homes, eight duplex townhomes, a home in Phillips and a home in Hampton during a 12-month period.
Hoping to continue to revolve those funds to develop owner occupied housing, Aurora Housing Development Corporation decided to apply for another $1,000,000 grant to add rental housing options to the area. One of the ways I supported this effort was by helping to write the grant.
If you have never written a grant before, it is important to know that there is usually a long narrative component of the application. For this grant, we needed to describe the community to individuals who may have never visited the area and have no idea what is happening in Aurora and Hamilton County. For this grant, one of the sections pertained to workforce development. As a result, I spent a great deal of time detailing a variety of different workforce development opportunities that are offered in Aurora starting at elementary age through adulthood. One of the events I included is called INVENTURE Day.
As luck would have it, the week after writing about this project and submitting the housing grant, I was able to attend INVENTURE Day as a mentor. For those of you who do not know what INVENTURE Day is, it is a day-long opportunity for sixth graders across Hamilton County to meet at the fairgrounds to learn about entrepreneurship from UNL Extension educators. During this day, teams of five are formed and paired with a mentor. They are given a widget, which they need to use to form a business plan while learning about branding, target marketing, and finance, before creating a two-minute quick pitch. 
I was paired with five students from Giltner for the day and I can say this was a great experience and opportunity for both mentors and students. I was very impressed by the level of knowledge and teamwork that these students brought to our group.  While I only worked directly with five of the students, it was fun to see a room full of almost 100 students getting excited about entrepreneurship and learning new business skills. Sixth grade may seem like an early age to start workforce development efforts, but after experiencing INVENTURE Day firsthand, it was obvious that it is never too early to start developing business skills and enhancing the great education that our students are already receiving in our local school systems.
Coming full circle and looking back at the words written in the housing grant earlier this month, I am happy to report that there were no embellishments needed. Hamilton County does a great job of developing talent starting at an early age. While we won’t know the results of our grant efforts until May, I can confidently say that we have a lot to be proud of in Aurora and greater Hamilton County and I am confident that we will continue to be a leading community in the areas of housing and workforce development efforts.   
 KELSEY BERGEN serves as executive director of the Aurora Development Corporation. She can be reached at kelsey@growaurora.com