Perryville organizations are being asked to cast their votes online to help bring a Missouri Extension conference to the city in 2025.
“Several of us have been working hard to bring the MU Extension’s ‘Connecting Entrepreneurial Communities’ (CEC) Conference to Perryville next year,” said City Administrator Brent Buerck. “We have secured our position as one of three finalists — along with Maryville and Excelsior Springs. It now comes down to voting. We would humbly welcome the support of your organizations in helping us bring this home. All it takes is a minute or two to vote.”
According to the University of Missouri Extension website, entrepreneurial communities are neighborhoods, cities, and counties that continuously work to facilitate economic development through entrepreneurship by strategically building and growing networks, cultures, resources, and policies that enable invention, innovation, and entrepreneurship to succeed.
The Connecting Entrepreneurial Communities (CEC) program was created to assist communities in building and growing these resources. CEC acts as a platform for economic developers, local government officials, and other practitioners to share best practices, learn from successes and sometimes failures, and exchange ideas.
MU Extension describes the CEC Conference as its “flagship event,” hosted annually in one of the state’s rural communities.
“Hosting a conference offers these rural communities an opportunity to showcase their downtown businesses, entrepreneurs, and other assets to a broad and diverse audience from across Missouri and its neighboring states. It is an opportunity for the rural community to show potential investors, funding agencies, entrepreneurs, newcomers, and state organizations that they are ‘open for business.’”
Those interested in voting for the city of Perryville to be the 2025 host of the CEC Conference can do so at this website — https://bit.ly/4cz9n1O.
