OCTOBER UPDATE: Data Results & Transformation Strategies

Greetings, and Happy Autumn!

Lots of exciting updates this month! Let's dig in...

MAIN STREET SAINT JOSEPH MISSION & VISION

After much workshopping, reviewing your feedback, and a lot of great discussion amongst our board members, Main Street Saint Joseph has Mission and Vision statements that we believe reflect our community's wishes, and provide us a guiding path forward.

MISSION of Main Street Saint Joseph

• Our mission is to cultivate a collaborative community mindset, concentrated on achieving shared goals that focus on historic preservation and economic vitality of our celebrated city center, and the enhanced quality of life it can provide for all.

 

VISION of Main Street Saint Joseph

• Our downtown district is a vibrant heart of our community, welcoming everyone and providing them with enriching and memorable experiences.

We will look to these statements--as a board and as a community--to forge our path forward, and we hope you'll join us in setting mission-focused goals together!

SURVEY RESULTS

Thanks to everyone who participated in the online community survey that was distributed in August and September. Our goal was 100 responses and received nearly 170!

Missouri Main Street Connection, our state coordinating partners, compiled your responses and shared them with our local board earlier this month. We can certainly make full data available to anyone who wishes to see it--just ask! But in the meantime, in an effort to provide easy-to-understand information, we've summarized a few data points to give you a glimpse into the trends that emerged from your feedback. 

*Word clouds --the hearts below--are a graphical depiction of words that were entered most frequently in a particular data set. The words that appear largest and/or near the center, are those that emerged most prominently in the data. Since word clouds differentiate between capital letters and different word types, you will see things like, "History," and "Historic," and even "history," listed as separate words, which is a known, but minor, flaw of word clouds. Word clouds are not an exact science but should still give you an idea of the trends that emerged. If you'd like to see formal data for these questions, we would be happy to provide it to you.

What 3 words come to mind when you think of Downtown St. Joseph? (Notice that Potential was the word used the most! Followed closely by Historic and Unique.)

List one thing you like most about downtown St. Joseph.

Additional responses revealed:

• Arts & Entertainment events bring the most people downtown, with Sculpture Walk, First Saturdays and Sounds of Summer mentioned most often.
• 71% of those who completed the survey live "elsewhere" in the community (i.e. not downtown)
• 47% of those who completed the survey said they'd "live downtown if they could."

TRANSFORMATION STRATEGIES

With this new data in hand, our next step is to choose two "Transformation Strategies," that guide our work and help us set goals in the coming months/years. The survey data reveals strong opportunities to look at our housing/resident make up downtown, and determine if there's any opportunity to improve housing. We may also dig more deeply into Arts & Entertainment to create more opportunities like the ones that already bring locals into our downtown. The data will be reviewed more thoroughly, and opportunities discussed until two overarching Transformation Strategies are chosen to help us focus our projects in a particular direction.

MARK YOUR CALENDARS! **VOLUNTEERS WANTED!**

We're coordinating our first community event! Mark your calendars for a Downtown Clean-Up Event, Saturday, November 20th, 10am-12pm. We're going to clean up our downtown public spaces so they're ready for big holiday events and crowds starting the following weekend!

We're currently making a list of cleanup needs and activities for that day, and once we have a better idea of the scope of work, we'll have an actual volunteer signup process so you know what you're getting into and what it entails! Watch for additional info and volunteer signup for this event, coming soon!

THANKS FOR READING!

As always, you can reach out to me, Dana Massin, if I can answer any questions about the above information. 

Dana Massin

Main Street Saint Joseph, President