The Department of Housing and Community Development continued its support of Growth and Opportunity Virginia Board funded projects in four priority investment strategies; startup ecosystems, cluster scale-up, workforce development, and site development and infrastructure. These strategies are recognized as essential building blocks for sustaining and accelerating the growth of traded industry clusters, which are interrelated firms who together contribute significantly to Virginia’s total economic output. Firms in supported traded clusters are positioned to compete to serve national and international markets and most importantly, drive wealth-creating employment opportunities for Virginians.

Among closed projects, there is an important distinction to be made in relation to regional per capita projects. These projects fall into one of two different categories: (a) implementation projects and (b) planning, pilot, and feasibility studies.

All implementation projects include quantified outcomes that are submitted as part of the initial application, included in the contracts obligating funds, and ultimately tracked and reported throughout the contract lifespan and in the final performance closeout report. While in recent years these outcome metrics have been solidified and the process for metric tracking from contractual obligation through closeout has become a focus of the program, at the earliest onset of the program, those processes weren’t in place. In those cases, many of the outcomes reported by the end of reporting were not gathered during the application period, and therefore appear as “not measured" in this report. There are other instances where more recent projects have committed outcomes as well as outcomes that appear as “not measured" due to those outcomes not being contractually obligated but still tracked by the grantee and subgrantee.

Planning, pilot, and feasibility studies often do not have quantified contractual outcomes and appear in this report as “not applicable". These projects, which are limited to less than $100,000 per project and may make up no more than $250,000 worth of projects by region each fiscal year, are developed and submitted with quantitative outcomes, usually in the form of a study or report. All projects falling under this category are required to demonstrate in the application process that they are precursor to a future implementation project through the GO Virginia program. An example of this relationship is demonstrated through the SHD Sites ECB, which closed this fiscal year, but led to a more than $800,000 implementation project that is currently in the implementation phase and will likely appear in a future closeout report.

All outcomes resulting from the Growth and Opportunity Virginia Program are self-reported with signed attestations to the accuracy of results reported submitted with closeout reports by both the subgrantee and the respective Regional Council Chair.