Henry County

With the support of community partners, which include the Harvest Foundation, Uptown Partnership, Rudy’s Girl Media, and Dan River Basin Association, the MSA Thriving Communities project will help to implement Henry County’s “Connecting and Correcting: Building Corridors of Hope across Henry County and Martinsville” initiative to extend an existing 11-mile multiuse corridor through five disadvantaged communities. The hope is that greater pedestrian connectivity in commercial districts will improve health outcomes for area residents and that a successful project will jumpstart efforts to find additional funding to continue subsequent phases of the project. 

City of Roanoke

In Roanoke, MSA will partner with the Greater Williamson Road Area Business Association and Roanoke Valley-Alleghany Regional Commission to identify a vision for the Williamson Road corridor that’s widely accepted by its stakeholders and effectively communicate with residents who do not speak English as their first language. Through participation in Thriving Communities program, the City of Roanoke and its partners seek to build authentic consensus around the future of the corridor. The vision of the “Williamson Road Commerce and Mobility Initiative” is to turn a struggling post-WWII auto-dependent street into a vibrant multi-modal mobility corridor that sustains existing legacy small businesses, nurtures emerging multi-cultural small businesses, enhances access into downtown and the city’s Innovation Corridor, restores connections between adjacent neighborhoods, and enables safe and reliable mobility options.