Reflections on the Community Empowerment Grant program
September 30, 2024 – Ben White
The Community Empowerment Grant (CEG) program turns five years old in 2025! As we look forward to beginning of the fifth year of delivering the CEG program in 2025, let’s look back at its origins and the impact of its services on the 26 communities of all sizes that have completed the service grant or are currently receiving the service grant.
Origins
At the beginning of 2020, Missouri Main Street Connection’s team created the CEG program by adapting the Affiliate Grant program, which served a similar purpose, and adding Transformation Strategies, introduced by Main Street America following their 2017 Main Street Refresh. Transformation Strategies provide a focused, deliberate path to revitalizing a community’s historic district. Main Street America developed this from its findings that the most successful programs focused on an economic strategy or strategies based on community input and a study of the community’s demographic and psychographic data. These work synergistically with the principles and methodologies of the Main Street Approach™ that were found to still hold true and remain relevant since its inception in 1980.
The CEG program includes Transformation Strategies in its programing as part of the service grant’s roadmap for forming a successful Main Street program. Through this process, communities engage in visioning with a Town Halls and community surveys followed by developing and implementing those ideas into what will guide the future of their downtown and learn these important practices and methods that they can repeat themselves. The end result of this program is a strong organization led by strong local leaders focused on engaging the community to advance the community’s objectives for a thriving downtown.
Impact
The 26 communities of all sizes that have completed the services or are currently in the middle of the services provided by the CEG program are a testament of the service grants effectiveness and impact. Each community has success stories of what they have and continue to accomplish through the Main Street Approach™. In recent years, several programs in smaller communities have seen tremendous growth.
First, Main Street Albany is one of the smallest communities in our network. They partner with local businesses and organizations to implement community-driven ideas, such as activating their downtown greenspace, Smith Street Park. Regularly held activities in this space such as band performances, farmers market activities, and childrens’ activities activate the space to include all community members throughout the year, and support their Transformation Strategies, 8-80: community-minded approach and arts entertainment.
Second, My Hometown Carrollton supports their Transformation Strategies of multi-generational—providing activities and amenities for the community’s diverse age demographic— and agricultural that were created from their surveys and Town Hall input sessions. These activities and initiatives added First Friday on the square and intentional beautification efforts, which includes colorful flowers downtown.
Third, Main Street Brookfield, in partnership with the City of Brookfield, started a façade grant program. This program provides a matching grant to building owners seeking to make physical improvements to their property. In addition, streetscape projects such as colorful banners, flowers, and more have been added. Main Street Brookfield and the City implemented these efforts in response to the community input sessions where improving the aesthetic of downtown rose to the top. These efforts help to improve the lives of all demographics in the community, supporting their Transformation Strategy of multi-generational.
The future continues to look bright as more communities in Missouri seek to participate in this matching service grant program and utilize the Main Street Approach™. MMSC is excited to continue to offer this service grant opportunity as well as support the advancement of these communities up the Tier system after completing the trainings of this service grant. This advancement means that these organizations will grow stronger, and the downtown historic district is more vibrant as a result of following and implementing the Main Street Approach™ over a period of time with true and noticeable economic differences. The implementation of this grant will continue to grow as we put a greater emphasis on continuing to foster the relationship between the public and private sector. A strong relationship between each the Main Street program and City has been proven to be the best approach to downtown revitalization. Each is uniquely set up to advance revitalization efforts best when all parties are working together towards one common goal. We are excited for 2025 and hope you will join us in making Missouri a better place for all through the Main Street Approach™.
