Prizery to host conference: Art and the Creative Economy

From Chris Jones, Director of the Prizery of South Boston, VA:

Nearly everyone realizes: The Arts aren’t a frivolous extra; the Arts are an economic spark plug that can lift your community out of its doldrums, attract industry and stimulate commerce.

Learn how to harness the potential of the Creative Class, buoy your quality of life and be ready to thrive as the global economy roars back to life.

Over three packed days, the Prizery of South Boston VA, will welcome a slew of guest speakers will share lessons in how their small cities were turned around by embracing the Arts. Roundtable discussions will put you in touch with other like-minded game-changers. Experts will introduce you to the many ways the Arts can permeate a community: Arts in Healing, Arts in Education, Historic Preservation, Architecture, Art in Industry.

Mayor Joe Riley of Charleston SC will present the keynote address during lunch on the second day of the conference, Wednesday Oct. 14. At night, hop on a bus to visit South Boston, the Town of Halifax and Halifax County’s cultural attractions, savor fantastic food and drink and see folk singer-songwriter Suzanne Vega in the intimacy of The Prizery’s beautiful Chastain Theatre.

Learn more details about the conference, and the Prizery here.

State budget cuts bring woes to Main Street

Are state budget cuts threatening your Main Street program?  This Thursday, we will talk to Kay Coches of Meadville, PA about the situation in Pennsylvania.  Meadville is a strong candidate to be selected by the program as a Main Street town.  Although many state Main Street programs do not provide funding for their towns, many do, including Pennsylvania’s.  Kay will talk about some Meadville promotional efforts that are moving forward regardless of whether they will receive funding or not.

If your state’s financial problems are impacting your downtown initiatives, particularly in small towns, please call in to share your story.

This is free and open call.  You are welcome to call in, or just listen on the web.  A recording of the event will be posted immediately after the event, which can be accessed by the link below.

EVENT:  Possible state budget cuts to Main Street programs
DATE & TIME: Thursday, July 30th at 10:00am Eastern
FORMAT: Simulcast! (Attend via Phone or Webcast — it’s your choice)
TO ATTEND THIS EVENT, OR HEAR A RECORDING OF IT, CLICK THIS LINK NOW…

Council for Entrepreneurial Development, Venture 2009

I attended the Council for Entrepreneurial Development’s (CED) Venture 2009 conference this week. The conference invites entrepreneurs in the technology and biotech spheres to make pitches to investors. I threw on my best tan slacks (one of two pairs of dress pants that fit) and headed down to Pinehurst, NC, to survey the situation, since it was in my neck of the woods.

I tweeted the whole event. The entire stream is here, but I’ll give you a few highlights.

Chris Hughes, cofounder of Facebook, was one of the keynote speakers. It was very amusing to see many well-dressed middle-aged people with a lot of money lining up to speak to the 25-year-old after the conference. I met Chris and told him about smallwander.com. He said it was a good idea, and appeared to have a sincere look in his eye.

John Stumpf, CEO of Wells Fargo and regular guy from Minnesota, gave a speech that was probably very similar to the one he gave internally to his company after they merged with North Carolina’s Wachovia. To paraphrase, “We’re a regular community bank, our two companies are complementary, America is going to come out of this crisis, eventually…”

John Denniston, green investor, had a very good presentation. He had a slide that showed that our country has 350% more debt than our GDP. That is way worse than it was during the Great Depression. Other take-home: now is the time to invest in green technology.

Erskine Bowles, President of UNC, had the most down-home speech of the presenters. The take-home message with him was that staff cuts are coming to UNC faculty. He talked a lot about the state and country needing to move to a knowledge-based economy, but everybody seems to know that by now. However, he rightly asserts that we need to make NC the go-to state for innovation.

I sat in on the presentation for the new tech companies. A couple highlights:

PocketGear puts their mobile applications store on all non-Apple smartphones.  In excess of 30,000 programmers have already written apps for them.

From a travel perspective, Nadev Gur of Worldmate talked about how his company will serve biz travelers on mobile devices. He said that travel is the largest e-commerce “vertical.”  You will be able to book itineraries and manage changes in real time while you are traveling.  Information, such as cancellations, are pushed to your phone.

From a smallwander perspective, it would be good to get an app together for mobile devices, apple or non-apple, to search for smallwander towns and amenities while traveling.  As far as seeking an investor at this point, I am open to ideas.

Small Towns, Big Ideas

Will Lambe, author of  Small Towns, Big Ideas: Case Studies in Small Town Community Economic Development, will be the featured guest for the next smallwander.com conference call.

The University of North Carolina’s School of Government, in collaboration with the North Carolina Rural Center published the book, which is the result of a yearlong study by Lambe, associate director of the Community and Economic Development Program at the School of Government.  The collection features real stories, from real places that are successfully confronting real challenges similar to those facing small communities everywhere, such as globalization, geographic isolation, urban sprawl, aging populations, and natural disasters.

Small Towns, Big Ideas profiles towns in 18 states ranging in population from 175 (Chimney Rock, N.C.) to 15,000 (Helena-West Helena, Ark.).  The case studies are told in an engaging narrative that includes information useful to civic leaders in small communities and policymakers dealing with rural development issues.

According to Lambe, “One of the main themes emerging from these case studies is that successful small towns tend to employ a range of strategies that cut across community and economic development broadly.  The case studies allow us to take the strategies apart and to draw conclusions about how and why particular strategies work across a wide range of small communities.”

Lambe is also interim director for the North Carolina Local Government Service Corps, a three-year initiative that will place graduates of the Master of Public Administration programs at UNC-Chapel Hill, UNC-Wilmington, and Appalachian State University into the service of economically distressed rural communities, beginning in 2009.  The Service Corps was initiated as a result of observing—during the Small Towns, Big Ideas study—the need for economic development and capacity-building assistance in many small communities.

Small Towns, Big Ideas can be downloaded from www.cednc.unc.edu/stbi.  The site also features a database of the case studies, searchable by criteria such as community type, location, and population.  A hard-copy of the publication can be ordered through the Rural Center’s website at www.ncruralcenter.org.

Our live conversation with Will will take place on Monday, March 30, at 10 am.  It’s free and open to the public.  There is also an option for you to type in your questions.  Immediately after the talk, a recording will be posted.

Here is the dial-in information:

EVENT:  Small towns, big ideas
DATE & TIME: Monday, March 30th at 10:00am Eastern
FORMAT: Simulcast! (Attend via Phone or Webcast — it’s your choice)
TO ATTEND THIS EVENT, CLICK THIS LINK NOW…

Do downtown promotions = dollars downtown?

Art Walk in Hillsborough, NC

Smallwander.com is hosting it’s monthly teleconference this upcoming Monday, Nov 24, from 10 to 11 am.  The topic is “Do downtown promotions = dollars downtown?

I particularly would like to explore why Hillsborough NC’s recent “Ladies Night Out” promotion was successful.  On a rainy Thursday night, hordes of women descended on the town and bought like crazy in the shops.  If you have similar stories about how special events translate to dollars in the shops, please think about them beforehand and share them with us.

Panelists will include Amy Wilmoth, a freelance marketing consultant for small businesses in the Triangle area of North Carolina, Elizabeth Read, Executive Director of the Alliance for Historic Hillsborough, Eddie Ide, President of Newton Merchants, Inc. of Newton North Carolina, and Greta Lint, tourism consultant.

We will be inviting town representatives in our smallwander network.  People will be able to either call in via telephone or listen in over the web.  They can also type questions to us.  The call will be recorded and eventually posted on our site as a podcast.

Smallwander.com hosts a free teleseminar/webinar on the last Monday of every month, from 10 to 11 am.  Topics relate to small town tourism and economic development.

Click on the link below to check out the web page and get the phone dial-in info.

EVENT:  Do downtown promotions = dollars downtown?
DATE & TIME: Monday, November 24th at 10:00am Eastern
FORMAT: Simulcast! (Attend via Phone or Webcast — it’s your choice)
TO ATTEND THIS EVENT, CLICK THIS LINK NOW…
http://instantTeleseminar.com/?eventid=5098998

Next seminar – creating special events to stimulate downtowns

Our next smallwander.com seminar will be an open discussion about planning special seasonal events in small towns.  With the holiday season approaching, many towns plan Christmas parades and home tours.  How important are they for your downtown?  Share your experiences with other downtown managers and tourist officers who are hoping to initiate these types of events.

In case you can’t attend, check back for a recording of the call, which will be posted on this blog as a podcast.  Smallwander.com hosts a discussion about small town tourism and economic development topics every last Monday of the month, at 10 am.

EVENT:  Creating special events to stimulate downtowns
DATE & TIME: Monday, September 29th at 10:00am Eastern
FORMAT: Simulcast! (Attend via Phone or Webcast — it’s your choice)
TO ATTEND THIS EVENT, CLICK THIS LINK NOW…
http://instantTeleseminar.com/?eventid=4418724

Judy Wicks on Local Living Economies

I went to a talk given by Judy Wicks last night at the NC Museum of History, hosted by the Center for Environmental Farming Systems.  As one member of the audience commented, Judy is a dynamo.

She is a co-founder of Business Alliance for Local Living Economies (BALLE), which builds networks of locally-owned businesses within communities that promote buying from each other, respecting the environment, and paying a living wage.  At home, she built the Sustainable Business Network of Greater Philadelphia.  Each of the networks draws on local experts representing the building blocks of a sustainable economy:  food, power, health, construction, etc.

She is a living example of following her conscience.  As the owner of the White Dog Cafe, she originally felt resistance to the living wage movement because she did not want to be told by others what she should pay her employees.  But after looking at the faces of her trusted staff, she thought, of course she wanted to make sure they were able to cover their basic needs.

This personal connection with people and place has been an ongoing theme for her.  She feels personally responsible for her restaurant’s location, which is also where she lives.  She has been living on the second floor of her brownstone building in Philadelphia ever since she fought to prevent it from being torn down to make room for a mall.  After a drought died up the natural areas close to home, she became conscious of how she was contributing to global warming and converted her restaurant to run on 100% renewable energy.

The White Dog Cafe is famous for being the first in the Philadelphia area to use humanely-raised cows and pigs and organic produce.  In order to make that happen, she had to personally set up a network of suppliers.  And, she didn’t stop there.  She felt strongly enough about shifting her local economy away from factory farming, the Cafe provided capital to help the suppliers distribute the good stuff to her competitors.  This grew into a non-profit, White Dog Community Enterprises, which receives 20% of their income from the for-profit restaurant.

Believe it or not, there is more.  Her life and work is a great example of the benefits of carefully building local living economies. Smallwander.com believes that towns that incorporate these principles are also great places to visit, since they are living and vibrant, take care of their people and animals, have unique activities going on, and celebrate the authentic.

Buy local podcast

Leon Tongret and Greta Lint discuss how buying locally helps small towns.

Download

Subscribe to podcast in Itunes.

Buy local-online seminar scheduled

Photo by Keith Pomakis

This conference call is free and open to the public.  Please share your thoughts about buy-local campaigns.  Hear from experts.  Ask questions.  Smallwander.com offers free seminars about small town tourism and economic development.  Calls are held on the last Monday of every month at 10 am.  The seminars are later posted as podcasts.

Smallwander.com showcases locally-owned merchants, attractions, restaurants, and lodging to travelers seeking authentic small town experiences.

EVENT:  Buy local
DATE & TIME: Monday, July 28th at 10:00am Eastern
FORMAT: Simulcast! (Attend via Phone or Webcast — it’s your choice)
TO ATTEND THIS EVENT, CLICK THIS LINK NOW…
http://instantTeleseminar.com/?eventid=3630342

More about big companies in small towns

From Blogging Stocks…

Big company, small town: Corning Inc., Corning, New York

Posted Jun 30th 2008 5:05PM by Joseph Lazzaro
Filed under: Corning Inc (GLW)

This post is part of our Big Company, Small Town series, featuring large companies and the small towns in which they are headquartered.

Rest assured, the first decade of the 21st century is not likely to be remembered as a renaissance period in U.S. history. No one will confuse this decade with the Roaring ’20s or even the Wonderful ’90s.

Further, if the nation needs an example of rebirth and renewal — it would be hard to find a better one than the story of multinational corporation Corning (NYSE: GLW), nestled in the small town of Corning, New York.

Corning is your classic, feel-good American success story. And doesn’t the United States need a few of those today?

Moreover, Corning, arguably, represents one of the signature corporate transformation stories of the digital age.

[Read the whole post...]