Concurrent Educational Sessions: Tuesday, April 3: 3:45 - 5:00 p.m.

• Community Kitchens: Making Food, Entrepreneurs, and Jobs Downtown
• Walking Tours: The First-person Introduction to Your Town
• Blending New Construction into Main Street
• I Wish Someone Would Redevelop that Building
• Rediscovering Your Fund-raising Plan
• Engaging Immigrant Business Owners in the Main Street Model
• Parking Management Strategies to Unlock Downtown Vitality

 Community Kitchens: Making Food, Entrepreneurs, and Jobs Downtown

Community commercial kitchens don’t just harness local food ways; they can incubate entrepreneurs. Learn about policy initiatives in Philadelphia that address healthy food in underserved communities and a $5 million fund-raising success that created a commercial kitchen in a distressed neighborhood in West Philadelphia. Then see how food can be used in branding in New Jersey’s Bridgeton Culinary District, which features food festivals, an expanded farmers market, gardens, and a commercial kitchen. CM | 1.25

Learning Objectives:

• Understand a variety of policy initiatives in Philadelphia that are addressing the need for healthy food in underserved communities
• Learn how the Enterprise Center in Philadelphia raised $5 million to create a neighborhood commercial kitchen and how the place works
• Get advice about branding a downtown as a food destination from Bridgeton NJ Main Street, and the events they hold to reinforce that brand image and their plans for a commercial (coop) kitchen.
• The impact these three initiatives are making in the region.

 Walking Tours: The First-person Introduction to Your Town

Guided walking tours should not be just dates and architectural styles or memorized snippets – this isn’t grade school! They should focus on the human elements, the stories, and the personalities that make your history come alive. Introduce tourists to your town through personal connection tours. Make them fall in love with your heritage, so they tell a friend and return to enjoy your events, shops, and restaurants.

Learning Objectives:

• Connect tour participants to their community story for a meaningful and long-term connection
• Involve tour participants in the tour itself. Connect familiar national topics to the story of Main Street, USA.
• Identify the difference between "facts by rote" introduction as opposed to personal connection tours
• Hopefully, interject humor and interpersonal communication into tours comfortably and with ease

 Blending New Construction into Main Street

New construction in a historic district can be welcome or problematic, depending on the appropriateness of the use, size, and design of the proposed building. A case study of the West Chester, Pennsylvania, Downtown Historic District will offer a set of tools for ensure compatible new construction in your historic district. Leave knowing how to evaluate the outcome of previous new construction projects in order to apply the lessons to new proposals.

Learning Objectives:

• Evaluate the outcome of previous new construction projects in order to apply the lessons to new proposals
• Identify character-defining qualities of the historic context essential to the successful integration of new construction
• Understand the tools available for protecting an existing historic context
• Develop a strategy for addressing new construction proposals

 I Wish Someone Would Redevelop that Building

Everyone wishes that a building or series of buildings in their community would be rehabilitated and put back into service. Don’t just wish for it – make it happen by learning the fundamentals of real estate development. Hear about the crucial data points, analyses, financial modeling, and operation assumptions that a building owner/developer, bank, and business will investigate before committing to a project – and learn how to see real estate deals from their perspectives. CM | 1.25

Learning Objectives:

• A review of the fundamentals of real estate development, finance, and operations from the perspective of a bank, a building owner, and a tenant

 Rediscovering Your Fund-raising Plan

You want more funding, but without a plan, fund raising will take a backseat to other activities. This session covers all aspects of income streams for your organization, laying it out in a simple, yet necessary, plan, and building a timetable to make each task manageable. Get planning strategies for municipal support (new and continuing), annual campaigns, sponsorships, special projects income, promotional income, grants, merchandise sales, and fund-raising events and get inspired by our success stories.

Learning Objectives:

• Identifying the key components that make up a healthy fundraising strategy for Main Street organizations.
• Walk away with many ideas for improving your current fundraising strategies by seeing what is current and most successful for other Main Street organization
• Learn what the best fundraising events are and what it planning and resources are needed.:

 Engaging Immigrant Business Owners in the Main Street Model

Immigrant-owned small businesses transform our Main Streets into vibrant, ethnically accessible corridors. Yet, at times it is challenging to absorb immigrant business owners into our Main Street Approach. This session will provide the “Seven Strategies of Inclusive Outreach and Public Engagement,” which focus on building and cultivating one-on-one relationships. You’ll learn how to work side by side with immigrant business owners to improve your business corridor, as well as how to design inclusive, flexible engagement strategies that work!

Learning Objectives:

• Participants learn alternative forms of inclusive engagement that are better suited when working with immigrant-business owners
• Participants learn and understand the Seven Strategies of Inclusive Outreach and Public Engagement which focus on building and cultivating one-on-one relationships
• Participants see immigrant-business as an overall economic asset for their business district
• Participants can learn how to incorporate immigrant services into the business corridor's competitive advantage

 Parking Management Strategies to Unlock Downtown Vitality

Is addressing parking in a new way your key to reducing traffic, increasing economic performance, and protecting the environment? By carefully regulating parking design, you can provide enough parking, while still building walkable, beautiful places. Learn how to estimate supply and demand and maximize your parking supply and find out the differences between managing on-street versus off-street facilities. Most importantly, find out why parking management is directly linked to the success of downtowns. CM | 1.25

Learning Objectives:

• Have a suite of tools to apply to your downtown
• Be able to conduct your own supply and demand analysis
• Understand success stories from around the country
• Have sample zoning and regulatory language to bring home