Marianne Langridge took over as the executive director of the nonprofit Verde Valley Regional Economic Organization, which provides business development services, on Aug. 15, replacing Mary Chicoine.
“She’s got a strong background in sustainability and I think the Verde Valley is very much in tune with sustainable economic development,” VVREO Board of Directors Chairman Tom Binnings said. “That and her background in coordinating and getting infrastructure developed, and kind of doing the groundwork to make that happen before companies come in and actually build it. We thought she [has] great collaboration skills.”
Langridge relocated to the Village of Oak Creek in 2020. She is the founder and CEO of Sustainable Synthesis Limited , P B C , a company that supports sustainability initiatives, and spent over two decades working for a company called CDM Smith in Boston. She holds doctoral and master’s degrees in systems engineering from the University of Pennsylvania.
“I was tired of the pace of the East Coast,” Langridge said. “It’s the balance of, especially Northern Arizona, getting a little bit more of a focus on being able to be in nature, be outside the community.”
“We moved to Arizona after our daughter passed away four years ago from cancer, so health and wellness and personal connection and community connections [are] important to us,” Langridge said. Her daughter Hilary was an Arizona State University student. “I’ve been doing a lot supporting grief … I’ve been a volunteer since we moved here.”
Langridge is a 30-year yoga practitioner who bought Village Yoga in 2021.
“When the studio that I was practicing at in VOC announced that they had to close, the loss to the community felt so abrupt. I asked what I could do to help, and a week later, I owned it,” Langridge said. “It was never part of my long-term plan, but I’m glad I [purchased] it … Because an important part of a vibrant community is having a place for people to come and convene and do healthy things.”
She added that the purchase also helped provide her with insight into the challenges faced by Verde Valley business owners.
“Most of the people who teach and work at the studio are part-time and have multiple jobs that they have to have to pay the rent,” Langridge said about challenges for local business owners. “Lack of stable housing is a big one, and the internet is another big one. It’s really hard to grow a business when you don’t have consistent connectivity, so I’d say those have been the two that I’ve run into the most. And the seasonality of the region, especially Sedona, is a challenge.”
“There’s just something special about the region, and finding a way to help it thrive without ruining what’s special about it is an interesting opportunity,” Langridge said of her two reasons for joining VVREO. “The other is, as a small business owner, the challenges that exist. And rather than sitting back and complaining, I thought it would be more productive to roll up my sleeves and help.”
Langridge said her priority for her first year is to develop an action plan for VVREO, and she hopes to relaunch the website by the end of the year.
We’re starting with the branding and the look and feel, and we’re creating it in a way to be scalable so that we can add more functionality, especially access to data,” Langridge said
Binnings said that VVREO is aiming to become a regional hub for economic data related to the Verde Valley, in part by developing economic data tables and a dashboard showing the current and past economic conditions of the the Verde Valley.
“We’re hoping to to see what the final results are of the [Broadband Equity Access and Deployment] program,” Langridge said. “But that’s been trying to have a seat at the table and explaining the importance of stable fiber in the region and what that will do for economic vitality, which has been a priority for the last about 10 years.”
“One of the things we’ve talked about are people who have move to Arizona and to the region, as what we call ‘digital nomads,’ [who] can work from anywhere,” Langridge said. “There’s a lot of opportunity to support businesses like that, that can hire full-time employees, and maybe grow to 10 to 20 people that are maybe more niche types of businesses with more flexibility.”
“It’s an important time for us to start to decide collectively what we want that to be, because the development that’s happening, especially in northern Maricopa County, is going to quickly start to bleed up,” Langridge said. “I’ve lived in places like Colorado where that hasn’t been proactively done, and I think [development’s] not ended up where people would have liked it to. So my role is to help convene and help facilitate a common vision and then an action plan for what that looks like, both in terms of policies and incentives, infrastructure development. Because, if we leave it to the private markets, the Verde Valley is not going to look like it looks right now. There’s some opportunities for a balanced approach, if we can get people to sit down and talk about it.”