Main Street Collaboration
Main Street meets Community Development in Philadelphia
Through a mix of shared plenary and breakout sessions, keynote presentations and offsite tours and the will offer participants an opportunity to enhance and tailor their experience by exploring select shared events hosted by both conferences and open to all participants.
For more than 25 years, local Main Street programs have been active in engaging community members in reversing disinvestment trends and seeking new economic uses for historic and underused buildings along commercial corridors. Their 2008 annual conference theme, Enriching Main Street Through Entrepreneurship and Diversity, seeks to emphasize the ways that entrepreneurship and diversity enrich commercial districts and the assets that serve as essential motivations for attracting customers, tourists, new residents and business, which is a natural complement to La Comunidad’s focus on asset-based community development, and in particular, how a community can leverage its cultural assets to improve itself socially and economically.
La Comunidad participants will have a chance to network and share activities with the 2008 National Main Streets Conference participants – more than 1,500 dedicated professionals and volunteers from around the country working in the preservation-based revitalization field. In a unique opening plenary, participants of the Main Streets Conference and La Comunidad will jointly explore the value of entrepreneurship and diversity through the rich context of Latino communities, and will set a new precedent for how a diverse range of attendees can approach community development and commercial revitalization.
Main Streets participants will also be invited to join two of La Comunidad’s plenary sessions. A youth plenary will feature youth from the Philadelphia area who will present their ideas and needs on how arts, culture and heritage play a role in their lives. Community Revitalization Through Heritage, the final event for La Comunidad, will take an in-depth look at commercial revitalization and community development and discuss how heritage development can act as a uniting force between these two often separated aspects of improving the livability of a community.
In addition to the larger sessions, La Comunidad and Main Streets will share joint tours to some of Philadelphia’s most successful projects and have four shared breakout sessions to provide opportunities to share information with each other in a more intimate setting. The breakout sessions will explore ways to build a new framework for understanding how arts, culture and heritage assets are catalysts for neighborhood cohesion and economic, social, political and youth development in inner city, suburban and rural environments.
For information on the 2008 National Main Streets Conference: http://conference.mainstreet.org/
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