Center for Economic and Community Development

Penn State's Center for Economic and Community Development is an applied research center dedicated to strengthening local and regional development in Pennsylvania and beyond. The Center works with communities to address the issues they face, such as economic and demographic change, government revenue and expenditure policy, community capacity building, and social and economic inequality. Our research outputs include timely short reports, economic impact analyses, and series projects, such as county-level demographic and economic profiles. The Center team includes faculty, staff, and students.

Join our mailing list and view our work.

Latest News

February 8, 2023

Penn State’s ‘Stories from the Field’ series announces spring lineup

Penn State’s “Stories from the Field” conversation series is returning this spring with three new sessions, with speakers sharing lessons for practitioner-academics, insights into how governments and communities can work together to tackle biosecurity threats, and stories that illustrate the importance of trust in vaccination-education efforts.

Read More

December 19, 2022

County Commissioners Association of Pennsylvania extends Schmidt’s fellowship

As Cristy Schmidt, Penn State Extension applied research educator, nears the end of her two-year term as the County Commissioners Association of Pennsylvania’s Extension fellow, the organizations announced a yearlong extension of her fellowship, moving the end date to Dec. 31, 2023.

Read More

December 12, 2022

Catching up with Pennsylvania’s Coming Together for Racial Understanding Team

The team discussed how they adapted the Coming Together curriculum for Penn State Extension, the reach and impacts of their work thus far, and their plans for taking it to a wider audience.

Read More

November 10, 2022

Food for thought... multiscalar resilience to inevitable change

This article addresses the concept of scale: do we think about resilience as individuals, in communities, or at the city scale? And what happens to our thinking on resilience if we conceive of humans as integrated within the environments and ecologies we inhabit? Thinking about humans as a part of the natural world rather than outside of it (or trying to control it) lends a very different perspective to how we think about and build resilient communities.

Read More