Focusing on what works

QUINCY — You get more success when you focus on what works.

That’s the approach to business, life, and community taken by the Initiative for Rural Innovation and Stewardship (IRIS), one the group encourages as it seeks to foster successful communities in the Columbia Basin.

“You focus on what works because you get more of it,” according to Nancy Warner, program coordinator for IRIS. “And everyone gets a part of it.”

IRIS staged its seventh annual North-Central Washington Success Summit on Tuesday at Quincy Junior High School, sharing stories of what works from businesses, governments, community groups, churches, and schools from across the region, hoping to encourage others to succeed in good times and bad.

According to Warner, the group collects stories — such as the expansion of Wenatchee Valley College’s nursing assistance program to the Methow Valley School District in order to provide nursing assistants in the Methow Valley — in order to share inspiring stories of things that work, and ways people and institutions can help each other.

“We’re a very broad organization,” Warner said of IRIS. “We’ll work with anyone who shares our values. We’re very open and very inclusive but we’re also very place-based as well.”

The reason for the grounding in place is simple. Warner said while the handful of counties that make up North Central Washington are vast, they really constitute a small and fairly tightly knit community.

“That’s an asset, we connect really quickly, especially through stories,” she said.

IRIS is in the process of gathering several hundred stories of success together online and hopefully will publish them as a book in 2020 — stories of businesses that did well by doing good, people who created something new to fill a need that had never been filled before.

“We’re interested in things that can be replicated,” she said.

Charles H. Featherstone can be reached via email at countygvt@columbiabasinherald.com