Partners for Better Communities (Virginia's DHCD Podcast‪)‬ Virginia DHCD

Holly Lesko, Business Continuity Team Program Manager for the New River Valley Regional Commission has spent three decades in the region, building relationships and exploring community engagement through storytelling, civic participation, and public health. 

Learn more about Holly in this episode and at the links below:


New River Valley Regional Commission
Healthy by Design Youth Digital Storytelling Project
Community Heart & Soul
NRV Business Continuity Team

Holly joined NRVRC in October 2020 and has been supporting the BCT with business and school outreach throughout the pandemic.  She is now helping to position businesses, governments, and communities to be prepared and more resilient to future impacts to health and economy. She has lived and worked in the New River Valley since 1989 and this position is a true return to her roots as her first position after graduate school was with the NRVRC as an economic development planner in 1992. Holly has worked with communities and organizations in the New River Valley region and across the Commonwealth for the past 30+ years in the areas of comprehensive planning, leadership development, economic development and enhancement, educational training and curriculum development, public health assessment and program delivery, grant writing, facilitation, assessment, and evaluation as well as grassroots community organizing.

Her focus in community development is on long-range goal development with community health assessments evaluation tools to create new ways of viewing and approaching issues and concepts through inclusive and diverse community engagement. In previous work at Virginia Tech, she served as the Principal Investigator for the Healthy NRV project in partnership with the NRVRC with Robert Wood Johnson Foundation funding. This project was a community-based participatory research program focused on assessing the impacts of health factors in community development and engaging youth in local communities in community health conversations utilizing her skills in community engagement, inclusive partnership-centered programming, as well as digital storytelling and gathering.

Additionally, Holly has worked extensively with federal, state, and local funding agencies and has helped local organizations and communities secure over $6,000,000 in local, state and federal aid to further development and community projects in the region.  Holly holds a Masters in Urban and Regional Planning from Virginia Tech.

Kathleen Frazier, FAIA, of Staunton, Virginia's Frazier Associates drew upon a career in preservation based downtown revitalization to create one of Virginia Main Street resource-rich technical sheets. Hear Kathy in conversation with staff member Zachary Whitlow on the nuts, bolts, and benefits of upper story housing as part of your revitalization strategy.

DHCD staff member Melissa Mason sits down with Mathews County Broadband Advisory Board Chair Judy Rowe on attaining "reliable, high speed affordable access to universal broadband for all of Mathews County by 2025." In this rural area, the volunteer commitment to audacious and important goals is making this quickly working to make this a reality. Listen in on this inspiring conversation on the power of the tenacious citizen.

This year we're profiling some of Virginia's local administrators, public servants who are often behind the scenes making things happen with creativity, passion, and care for the place and people surrounding them.

"I like being able to do all kinds of things in one day," says Scottsville Town Administrator Matt Lawless who talked to us about the variety of challenges, joys, and rewards of serving a small town with a historic district, flood risks, a resilient community network, strong regional partnerships, and eyes on the future.  "I see my work as understanding what the community wants to see happen, identifying the parts of it that government is good at, and then find volunteers and get other people excited.  How can we do this together?  It works better that way, and it's more fun than just paying for things with taxes."  Hear more about the fun right here or wherever you stream your podcasts.

Explore Scottsville online and then plan a visit. https://www.scottsville.org/visit/ 

Crowdfunding can attract capital to new and growing businesses, and the "return on crowd" is measured in much more than dollars. In the final Creating Community Vitality podcast, crowdfunding expert Bill Huston provides tips and strategies for effectively attracting dedicated customers and investors.

Learn more about Pittsburgh's Honeycomb Credit.
Learn more about the American Dream Marketplace.
Get the full, year-long Creating Community Vitality series of webinars and podcasts here.

Bill Huston educates entrepreneurs, nonprofits and small businesses on how to raise community capital using seed and investment crowdfunding. He has managed dozens of successful crowdfunding campaigns globally throughout his 8 years in the crowdfunding industry. In 2014, INC. Magazine named him a top 19 global crowdfunding expert. Huston provides community capital consulting and coaching that focuses on social entrepreneurs, community-level real estate development and nonprofits that are creating businesses to
solve social issues. He focuses on building engaged and excited crowds that will allow NonProfits & Social Enterprises to successfully participate in the community capital and Locavesting economy.

Kirsten Moore opened Magpie–a breakfast and lunch diner-inspired restaurant and bakery, and The Perch at Magpie–a coworking space for small businesses, freelancers, and remote workers—in July 2020 in the middle of the pandemic lockdown. Having started an extensive historic renovation of an old auto service building in September of 2019 to house the businesses, it was a train that couldn’t be stopped once the pandemic hit. As it turned out, it wasn’t the worst possible time to open, but rather the perfect time to open. An entrepreneur and food writer with a background in design and marketing, Magpie is the culmination of many aspects of her career and synthesis of her passions. 

Get the full Creating Community Vitality Series here.