Trailer Meet Me Downtown

Show Transcript
Hello and welcome to the trailer for the Meet Me Downtown Podcast. I’m really excited to be bringing this podcast to life and I’m really excited you’re here to listen to it. When I started my position as Executive Director in Red Wing, Minnesota for their Downtown Main Street Organization, it was very clear to me that other people in all parts of the country were doing other really cool things in their downtowns. I wondered if there was a way to hear about some of those things that could be replicated in my downtown. And I didn’t find a great place for that so I thought, well I’ll start one, and I thought a podcast is a great place for that.
My hope is to bring together people from all across the United States who are doing important and hard work in their downtowns to keep them vibrant and healthy and to do the work of revitalization. Our downtowns have taken a hit in the last, you know, 20 years where retail has changed and especially in rural areas, agriculture has shifted so drastically that it’s really put so much strain on our downtowns that they need all the help they can get. While I love the Main Street program, I know it’s not available in all areas of the country and so I thought, well maybe this podcast can reach a lot of those places and have people learn more about what others are doing in their towns.
So we’re gonna learn about all sorts of different things. We’ll learn about events and festivals and barbecues and music fests and all those kinds of things that make downtown really come alive. But we’ll also learn about development projects, interesting collaborations and partnerships that have come together to help support downtowns. We’ll hear from Main Street Directors and Chamber Commerce Directors and volunteers. Other folks who love downtown and love their community and understand that it’s going to take a lot of effort to keep our downtowns alive. Of course with online shopping and the different kinds of challenges to retail, we’ll hear about experiential shopping opportunities, that getting people to have things have happened in their towns that are experience based is going to be vital to getting people to shop and to make a decision to not go online to shop, but instead to get in their car, or get their shoes on and go for a walk down to their downtown.
I just thought I’d maybe say a little bit about me. I have been a director for a couple of years and I’m a part-time director. I also have my own business called Unleashed Consultants where I provide marketing communications, especially around social media and digital marketing to nonprofits. And I just love it, and it works and fits so nicely with my work. I have a degree in Business, that’s actually my background. I’ve been a business consultant for over 16 years and so I come at a lot of the strategies in my work in downtown kind of from a business perspective. But then I also have a Master’s degree in Organizational Leadership and I focus on nonprofits and so I think that my background is really interesting for the work we do in downtowns because it is such a mix of business, commerce, and community, nonprofits, etc. So I hope to be able to share my experience of what we do in Red Wing and the things that we learn as we go. We are not always successful, we have some great successes but sometimes things don’t go the way we planned or they turn out a little differently than we thought.
So I hope to share my experiences in my town as well, but also to help to spread the word about how others are doing wonderful work in downtowns all across the United States. So I hope you’ll join me in this podcast experiment. Make sure to go to my website, meetmedowntownpodcast.com and there’s a place to actually contact me if you want to find out more about me or contact me for any reason, but there’s also a place to submit an idea.
I know that there are so many wonderful things going on out in the w