Imagine your community worked together to identify key strategies that provide a clear sense of priorities and direction for your revitalization efforts? What would that look like?
As a passionate advocate for your Main Street community, you are on a mission to harness all the things you love about your community for its future, a bright future. That may feel like a big task, so many choices and so many different directions to go. Your neighbors and colleagues have many different opinions and interests, too. Where do you start?
Getting to that bright future Main Street-style is a combination of art and science: first you and your community need to learn about the local economy, its primary drivers, and its regional context (the science). At the same time the community needs to identify that special sense of place through storytelling, finding the valuables that set it apart, broad and inclusive civic engagement, and marketing (the art). By doing so you identify the key strategies that point the way forward.
Through Virginia Main Street’s (VMS) Mobilizing Main Street (MMS) program, 10 communities are starting this journey. Their first step is to appreciate all their community has to offer through an activity called Asset Mapping. Assets are what we want to keep, build upon, and sustain for future generations. The activity also challenges you to recognize how other people see and experience your community. I bet you will identify with what our mobilizers valued most:
- Natural assets, our waterfront and surrounding state parks provide outdoor recreation;
- Social assets, our strong artist community, the creativity is a catalyst;
- Built assets, the downtown, historic buildings house diverse eateries;
- Economic assets, artisan beverage companies and breweries attract visitor spending; and
- Service assets, our local community college, and its entrepreneur program, generate new businesses.
Take this asset mapping exercise for a spin and invite your community leaders to chime in. It’s just the beginning of a journey of learning about your hometown and what matters most along the way.
Do you want to learn more about how to harness your local assets? Join the VMS team at the upcoming regional Rev Up: Preservation-Based Economic Development workshops. Click here to register!
Virginia Main Street 