Promise Zone

OP-ED: Promise Zone keeps pushing for regional progress

SC Promise Zone
Participants worked on an exercise during the December grant-writing workshop.

Participants worked on an exercise during the December grant-writing workshop.

By Andy Brack, Center for a Better South  |  There’s a palpable sense of energy flowing through the six counties of the southern tip of South Carolina in the federally-designated Promise Zone, which is now a year and a half old.

Walk along a downtown street or drive past expanding businesses and you get a tingling that things are happening.  Two years ago, the SouthernCarolina Alliance, lead partner of the Promise Zone, was about the only regional organization that worked to pull people together to develop projects to benefit the area.  Fortunately, the organization had the foresight in 2014 to try to win the Promise Zone designation as a way to bolster inter-agency collaboration and get local, state and federal organizations in silos to come out into the open and work better together. Read more →

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Wilson co-sponsors bill to spur job creation, investment in Promise Zone

SC Promise Zone

U.S. Rep. Joe Wilson, R-S.C., is a chief co-sponsor of legislation that will create new tax credits to give incentives to businesses to hire residents of federally-designated Promise Zones like the one that is in part of his congressional district.

Wilson

Wilson

The bill, the Promise Zone Job Creation Act, also would encourage new investments to bring property, equipment or software to hard hit communities in the zones.  South Carolina’s Promise Zone includes all or parts of Allendale, Bamberg, Barnwell, Colleton, Hampton and Jasper.  The designation, which provides priority help for organizations seeking federal grants and loans that help the area, was awarded in April 2015. Read more →

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Press and Standard: Promise Zone already helping

SC Promise Zone

From a Jan. 17, 2016, editorial in The (Walterboro, S.C.) Press and Standard:

16.01.press_and_standard“Congratulations to the City of Walterboro and its residents on receiving over $2 million in Promise Zone funding to upgrade the city’s sewer treatment facilities.

“The grant, which doesn’t have to be paid back, will pay for nearly all of the $3.4 million upgrade. The city also received an additional $500,000 grant from the S.C. Rural Infrastructure Authority, further dropping the price tag. Plus the improvements could generate as many as 129 jobs in the community.

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