Introduction to Harpswell Strategies
As the supporting cast behind ADG, The Better Future Alliance is a network of ‘Comeback Community Champions’ with the training, skills, and connections to help local leaders facilitate a better economic future for their communities. Perhaps the best way to introduce the Better Future Alliance is through the individual members.
Meet Jacob Sesker
Better Future Alliance member Jacob Sesker is the Principal Consultant at Harpswell Strategies, LLC. Harpswell Strategies provides economic and public policy consulting services to real estate developers, non-profit organizations, and municipalities up and down the east coast. In Maine and New Hampshire, those clients are generally small communities or community non-profits with resource constraints and limited staff capacity.
“Those are my favorite projects,” Sesker says. “They require thinking carefully about how to do as much as possible with limited budgets and timeframes. They require working in an environment where everyone is stretched thin – the City or Town Manager might also be the Police Chief or Harbormaster, the Planning Department might be one person, the town might not even have an economic development function in-house. Those towns need amenities and services, but they need a lot of help getting from here to there.”
Experience from the Inside
And sometimes, Sesker says, towns start off looking for a specific service and eventually realize that they need general staffing support as well. “For someone like me who has worked in local government management for years, serving as an interim or fractional staffer is a good way for me to scratch that itch. And, as the workforce ages, many communities find themselves needing 
help to get through transitions or to get things kickstarted or re-started.”
That work comes with an extra benefit for Harpswell Strategies’ other clients as well. “The reality is, there is no better way for me to improve my understanding of the social, political, and fiscal forces affecting my client base than to spend some of my time working for them from the inside,” Sesker says. “Whether we are talking about access to care, addiction, homelessness, or transportation challenges, the best way to understand the pressure these communities are under is to talk to stakeholders and municipal management about what they face every day.. The interim staffing and fractional work that I do has made me a better consultant on all of my projects.”
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Jacob Sesker is a planner, economic developer, and public policy professional with 20 years of experience working for and with local governments. His firm, Harpswell Strategies, provides economic and fiscal impact analyses, quantifies financing gaps and identifies solutions to close them, market and feasibility analyses, and strategic planning services.
Jacob’s expertise includes:
- Analyzing local economies;
- Understanding the relationships between business climate and economic performance;
- Understanding the connections between real estate investment decisions and local tax revenues;
- Catalyzing change by identifying opportunities for strategic redevelopments that will drive prosperity and create economic opportunities; and
- Helping local communities understand how to provide the amenities and services they need to succeed without breaking the bank,
