Joyce Hickey and Tyler Lake from KHIC’s lending team and Tara Robinson and Brian Sizemore from its technical assistance team soon will earn their national Economic Development Finance Professional certification from GrowAmerica.
“The GrowAmerica training has helped me tremendously to apply what I learned in college to the real world,” said Lake, a lender who worked for 4 years as a banker before joining KHIC in 2022. “I gained a different perspective on lending than what I was taught in banking. The approaches, end results and goals are different. Instead of fitting a project into a wooden box, the GrowAmerica courses challenge you to collect extraneous pieces and define them as a working whole.”
In addition to leading community and economic development projects for state and local governments, GrowAmerica teaches professionals how to use various federal programs to leverage the most possible from limited community resources.
The training includes hands-on group learning and individual learning by working through dozens of case studies and comprehensive exams.
“It’s enlightening. It has made me aware of all the different things that go into economic development — and economic development lending in particular,” said Robinson, a CPA who joined KHIC in May 2023 to complete KHIC’s TA Team. “And it makes you look at how your work affects the community and makes lives better. You come to see the bigger over a longtime horizon and how working with community partners makes for thriving businesses and communities.”