Is it time for a Community Asset Inventory?

Although, I’m not originally from Elizabethton, I have come to admire this community a great deal. I remember moving here as a young college student and thinking, there is just so much to do! Being from Ohio’s rural breadbasket there was little else to do other than go to a corn maze or canoe along our dirty, flat rivers.

But here in Elizabethton, we have great community and state parks to visit, different hiking opportunities every weekend, clear, pristine rivers for rafting or fishing, intriguing historic sites that actually have significance in our nation’s history, unique small mountain towns just waiting to put their character on display, gorgeous mountain vistas, beautiful lakes nestled between mountain ridges…well, I could go on and on, but you get the idea. These are the things my family love to see and experience when they come for a visit and I always enjoy the look on their face when they see it for the first time.

In business, the term ‘asset’ has a meaning that is recognizable to anyone that has taken a basic accounting class. In simple terms, an asset is anything that can be controlled to produce value or has a positive economic value of the entity. Each community has its own set of assets that are utilized to make the community better. Do we know what Elizabethton’s are?

There are so many assets in our community that I think many of us (including myself from time-to-time) forget about these opportunities that many travel to come see. We talk a lot, these days, about the benefits tourism can have on our community. It touches every aspect of our community’s decisions. Tourism is nothing more than having a specific set of resources and turning those resources into assets – something that can be controlled to produce value to our community.

It’s time for our community to inventory our community’s resources and create a unified plan to turn those resources into community assets. Tourism is just one set of resources that can be turned into an asset; there are many others ranging from our workforce’s specific skill set, to a niche business type specifically found in Elizabethton. What other resources should we be looking to turn into a community asset? Let’s talk about it!