This partnership has created several unique opportunities both for NMSC and PPS, but also, more importantly, for the Main Street America and Urban Main networks. First launched was the Cultivating Place in Main Street Communities, a series of two-day intensive training workshops that began in five pilot states in 2016—Alabama, Connecticut, Missouri, Montana, and Oregon—and continued with a second round in five more states in 2017: Louisiana, Michigan, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, and Wyoming. These trainings not only instruct Main Street communities how to integrate placemaking principles into their Main Street work, but also draw for them a path to implementation.
In order to help make implementation of placemaking efforts easier, NMSC has also partnered with the national, nonprofit crowdfunding platform ioby for the Cultivating Place on Main Street: Crowdfunding Challenge, a set of crowdfunding campaigns with matching grants offered exclusively to the states selected for the Cultivating Place trainings. Learn more.