Late-Summer Update

Greetings, friends and neighbors!

I don't know about all of you reading this, but for me, summer has flown by... as is reflected by the tardiness of the "monthly," Main Street Saint Joseph update!

Even though the blog has been absent of updates for an extra few weeks, your local Main Street crew has been very busy with multiple events--both hosting and attending!--and there's a lot to share.

Here's a recap of this year's focus...

2022 Primary Objectives of Main Street Saint Joseph

1. Learn the nationally-proven, data-driven Main Street model for revitalization and find ways to apply it in Downtown St. Joseph.
2. Apply the Main Street foundational principle of engaging our community to create meaningful, measurable, and lasting change.
3. Identify projects most needed in our community and work together to make them happen.

I'll elaborate on each below and the progress we've made this summer!

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1. Learning the Main Street Model

In order to maintain good standing with our state coordinating partners at Missouri Main Street Connection, each of our board members is required to attend at least one in-person Main Street training each year. Four of our nine board members attended the 3-day Missouri Main Street Conference in KC, Aug 3-5th and brought home a wealth of knowledge and inspiration on the many ways to drive economic success in our historic Downtown! Session titles included Creating People-Centered Places, Tools for Business Recruitment, How CIDs and Entertainment Districts Strengthen Your Community, The Intersection of Humanities and Main Street, Storymapping, Volunteerism in Your Community... and many more.

Earlier this week (August 23rd) our state coordinating partners from Missouri Main Street Connection came to St. Joseph for another board training on creating work plans and organizing fundraising around  our soon-to-be-selected community projects. 

So... we've learned a lot this month alone! 

2. Engaging the Community

While any group of us could walk around Downtown, point out things that need to be done, and immediately get to work in filling those needs, the Main Street model is very specific about getting community input to identify needs, assess shared priorities, set measurable goals and meet them TOGETHER. 

That's why this spring and summer we held several mini sessions, and one large Project Brainstorm Town Hall to get as much community feedback as possible! With hundreds of ideas in hand, we engaged yet another group of local volunteers on August 11th to look at the ideas, assess them on resources needed and chronology of execution, and whittled down further to about 30 project ideas. 

While I don't yet have a final set of projects to present you, I can tell you the ideas generated are beginning to reveal top-level priority themes identified by the hundreds of you who have weighed in. Those priorities include supporting existing (and recruiting new) businesses to downtown, refining marketing strategies, the desire for more events, specific ideas on how to improve downtown aesthetics, and nurturing an arts culture downtown.

Main Street Saint Joseph board member, Trevor Tutt, works with a volunteer group brainstorming ideas on how to support existing businesses downtown.

Could our board of 9 individuals simply picked a project and begun working on it? Of course! But we'd be missing out on the community input, consensus building, and long-term engagement of community members who want to see their ideas come to life. 

We're in this for the long haul, and that means building the communication and volunteer structures to make a sustainable revitalization program.

July Town Hall attendees listen to the opening introduction before lending their thoughts to the collaborative work session that followed.

3. Identify projects most needed in our Downtown community

So here we are... Much closer to project selection than we were only a few months ago! Some of you took part in idea generation this summer, some of you helped to assess and prioritize ideas of others, some of you have yet to get involved and are waiting for your time to shine! -- (There will be plenty of opportunities ahead.)

In case you want a roadmap of where we are in this year's process, here's the update graphic!

All that said, we're getting closer to setting some official, community-driven projects for Downtown in the 2023 calendar year. We can't wait to map out our official goals and work together to make them happen!

Until then, I hope you all have a great start to the school year and plan to visit downtown this fall! (There's a lot of fun stuff happening! Just check out the Downtown St. Joseph Facebook page!)

Dana Massin

President, Main Street Saint Joseph