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.

Guest speakers will be Lee Moritz, member of the Conover City Council, Donald Duncan, Conover Town Manager, Bob Barbee, chairman of the Oakboro Regional Historical Museum, Larry Branch, Oakboro town administrator, Elizabeth Read, Executive Director for The Alliance for Historic Hillsborough, and Greta Lint, tourism consultant and writer specializing in small town promotion.  Click here for the complete press release.

The 10 am call is free and open to the public.  You can either listen via the web, or dial in by telephone.  Click here to register and I’ll send you the dial-in/webinar access information.

Recordings of past conference calls.

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…

Since several member towns and promoters were interested in why the event is so successful, we share a brief slideshow presentation of the event prepared by Anne Derby of the Hillsborough Yarn Shop.

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.

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…

We’ll ask John about some of his favorite small towns that celebrate art.  Our local arts council president, Tinka Jordy, will be on the call to discuss what we can do to make our town, Hillsborough, NC, more of an arts destination.

Hope you can join us.  If you can’t make it, I’ll eventually post it as a podcast.  We’ve got a backlog of them.  Thanks for being patient.

This is a webcast as well as a teleconference.  If you go to the web page below, you’ll be able to type in questions for our guest and you’ll be able to hear us.  If you phone in, you’ll be able to speak to us.

EVENT:  Art towns
DATE & TIME: Monday, February 23rd 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=6267333

Since downtown organizations are continually facing conflicts about all sorts of issues, including development pressures, I thought I would share with you some of the principles of conflict management taught to me by the Orange County Dispute Settlement Center in North Carolina.

Staff of the Dispute Settlement Center of Orange County, NC

Positions vs interests

A lot of times we argue from a set-in-stone position instead of an underlying issue. An example would be two people arguing about whether a window should be open or shut in a room.

Position 1: The window needs to be closed.

Position 2: The window needs to be open.

Interest 1: Raising the temperature of the room.

Interest 2: Keeping pollen out of the room.

Granted, this is a springtime example that I am giving you in the middle of winter, but you can remember what spring was like, can’t you? I believe this example came from Getting to Yes, by Roger Fisher and William Ury. Once you look at the problem from an interest standpoint, you can come up with an easy solution that solves both party’s problems in a spirit of collaboration.

Solution: Raise the thermostat.

This is assuming that neither party has an interest to keep the planet viable, which happens a lot.

“I” messages vs “you” messages

Anyone who has ever been involved in a conflict will know that you can’t negotiate with someone by constantly pointing the finger back at them. If you do that, all they have to say is, “No, that’s not true,” and you don’t get anywhere. If instead, you focus on what your own thoughts and feelings are, then the other party is more inclined to listen.

Conflict management styles

Competing: Pursuing personal concerns at the expense of someone else.

Accommodating: Yielding to the other party’s point of view.

Avoiding: Not addressing the conflict.

Compromising: Seeking the middle ground.

Collaborating: Working together to come up with a solution that is pleasing to both parties.

Would you agree that collaborating is the desired conflict management style in most cases? However, the other styles have their appropriate uses. For example, you don’t want to collaborate with someone who does not want  to get out of a burning building if they don’t want to go.

Perfection vs discovery

Perfection: We act as a judge. Things are black and white. Failure is seen as bad. This can lead to frustration.

Discovery: We act as a coach. You look for creative solutions. There is more of an attitude of acceptance. This can lead to fascination.

This is the tip of the iceberg. If you would like more information, feel free to contact me, or, particularly if you are local, the Orange County Dispute Settlement Center.

Our friend Mike Knutson over at Reimagine Rural saw our post about Jim Thorpe, and this got him thinking about a recent post he made about third places.  Third places are those hot spots in your community where you can share ideas, such as coffee shops.  Mike goes into detail about the characteristics of third places here.  Third places are neutral ground,  accessible and accommodating, and are places where you can routinely run into regulars.   In case you are wondering, the first place is your home and second place is your work.

How important are third places to you?  Should we make a special effort to design communities with third places?

Mike will join me on Monday morning at 10 am to discuss the role of third places in rural communities.  Feel free to call in.  Or, you can wait until I post the conversation as a podcast.

EVENT:  Third Places
DATE & TIME: Monday, January 26th 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=5847438

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