2024 Main Street Now Conference

Welcoming and belonging strategies help build bridges between new and existing residents, business owners, visitors, and other stakeholders to create stronger bonds within communities. Successful Main Streets foster a sense of community ownership for each resident by ensuring equal access to, and a role in, downtown for people from all backgrounds, including incomes, ages, races, and abilities. Whether it’s welcoming new neighbors, championing strategies to prevent gentrification or displacement, adopting immigrant-friendly policies, or creating space for group expression, Main Street organizations are well-positioned to advance these principles and strengthen their districts’ social, civic, and economic fabric.

Civic infrastructure - parks, trails, town squares, play spaces, libraries, and other public places – boosts local economies, increases resiliency and trust, supports health and well-being, creates a more equitable society, increases civic engagement, and strengthens democracy for all. Underlying a community’s civic infrastructure is a system of interconnected policies, programs, and people that work in tandem to build and foster a sense of place. Main Streets share in the community-wide need to dedicate time and resources towards expanding access and use of civic infrastructure to enhance quality of life and create more sustainable communities with vibrant social capital.

Major economic transformations over the past decade – from real estate market conditions and pandemic disruptions to macro-economic shifts and local entrepreneurship trends – have presented local communities with myriad challenges. In response, Main Streets have adopted future-focused solutions to leverage their place-based assets, remain competitive, and reorient their economic bases for local prosperity. To adapt in an ever-changing landscape, Main Streets can support local investment and ownership in their districts, activate underutilized spaces through creative reuse, champion people-centered infrastructure, and bolster grassroots economic vitality strategies.