CCPEG Impact Case Study

Chautauqua County’s journey toward renewed economic vitality began with a simple but urgent realization: its fragmented approach to community and economic development was holding back economic opportunity. For decades, overlapping organizations, competing agendas, and a lack of unified leadership limited the county’s ability to respond to demographic decline, workforce shortages, and structural economic challenges.

In 2018, Chautauqua County leadership and the County of Chautauqua Industrial Development Agency (CCIDA) partnered with Camoin Associates to assess and reform the system. From the earliest stages of this systemic transformation, the Ralph C. Wilson, Jr. Foundation has been a steady partner, poised to provide strategic support. The assessment eventually led to the creation of the Chautauqua County Partnership for Economic Growth (“Partnership”).

Through the Partnership, more than 60 community-based projects have advanced across the county between 2021 and 2025. The objectives range from countywide workforce campaigns and healthcare training initiatives to downtown revitalization, placemaking investments, small business development, and feasibility studies that unlocked new housing opportunities. These projects were made possible, in part, by a catalytic Project Leveraging Fund, supported by the Ralph C. Wilson, Jr. Foundation.

The results of the Project Leveraging Fund are striking. For every $1 spent from the Foundation’s Project Leveraging Fund between 2021 and 2025, an additional $46 was contributed by other public, nonprofit, and private sources.

In 2026 – and in collaboration with the Ralph C. Wilson, Jr. Foundation – the Partnership commisioned Camoin Associates to provide a case study on the impact of its work during the first five years of its existence. The report, entitled Economic Development Reform in Chautauqua County, New York, is provided here.

Not only does this case study serve as a reminder of the many accomplishments CCPEG has achieved since it was first launched, but it also serves as a model for how philanthropy can make impactful investments in rural communities outside of Chautauqua County. As a result, other counties and municipalities across rural New York State can utilize the CCPEG model for their own economic development efforts.