In the fall of 2004 MDF was hired to administer the very first grant offering from "The Fund for the Efficient Delivery of Local & Regional Services". Over a 3-year period, MDF worked very closely with a team from the Department of Administrative and Financial Services and the Maine State Planning Office. Our goals were fairly simple:

• Select projects with the greatest likelihood of success, the strongest potential to save money, and the best opportunity to be replicated;

• Require that grantees report not only on their ultimate results but on the process and what they learned that could help others with future collaborative efforts;

• Finally, we vowed to do whatever we cold to help them succeed.

In this presentation Laurie Lachance (former State Economist and current President of the Maine Development Foundation), who has been analyzing and forecasting Maine's economic performance for 25 years, provides a little background on the report, shares a brief description of the types of projects funded, and talks about some of the lessons learned. This presentation was given to the Department of Administrative and Financial Services in October of 2007 and at the Lewiston/Auburn Regionalization Conference, The Dating Game, in November of 2007.