Have you ever had one of those weeks where you had high expectations for success and yet weren’t sure that your expectations were realistic? Well, I’m doing a happy dance in my office because not only did our organization meet them, it exceeded them.
This might sound kind of boring to you, but a Main Street organization like the Sumner Downtown Association is made up of four important committees. They are: Organization (membership/volunteers/fundraising); Promotion (events/cooperative advertising campaigns/press releases); Design (flower baskets/murals/historic preservation); and Economic Restructuring (business recruitment/loan pools/data collecting and statistics/working with downtown landlords).
It might not sound exciting, but truly, when I get caught up in the hows, whys and can-we-do-its, I get a little giddy making strategic plans for Main Street viability. Especially if you’re talking about planning for five or 10 years from now. Because in my humble opinion, if you’re not looking to the future when you create business and marketing plans, then you’re just making new plans every year.
What had me so excited this week was my board’s renewed commitment to making these four committees more vibrant and active in the community. We’ve already received commitments from about eight newly interested business owners and community volunteers who are genuinely interested in making a difference in Sumner.
Let me give you a couple of examples of some of the topics discussed this week in these committee meetings:
First, historic preservation, a subject near and dear to my heart. While the new preservation ordinance is in place, the city commission still needs another interested applicant or two in order to get it up and running. You can get an application online at the city Web site.
Downtown murals. It looks like we might be getting somewhere with our plans for cleaning up the old KC’s Caboose site after some talks with the property owner and a couple of local sign and landscaping businesses.
A Rhubarb Festival? If I had a nickel for every time someone suggested that we have a rhubarb festival here in Sumner I’d be rich. Our new promotions committee is working on how that might look. In fact, SDA is hosting its first merchant Rhubarb Festival this week which will feature all things rhubarb that local businesses might be interested in carrying.
It’s exciting to see what our downtown is doing to promote itself, stay vital and continue with a reputation of being a bustling hub of activity where the community can gather, have fun and even a slice of rhubarb pie.
It seems to me that if our own community thinks it’s fun to spend some time downtown, it’s a shoe in that visitors will, too.
