Building Vibrant Communities

CreatINg Places - The Challenges and Opportunities in Embracing What's Weird

A challenge facing communities right now is how to reopen while keeping residents safe through physical distancing. In a time when we’re required to maintain physical distance to protect public health, streets need to do more than ever.  Streets must be configured so that people are able to move safely and provide space so people can safely access food, essential services, and businesses.

Bridget and Jonathan talk with Allison Burson of the The Lawrence and Lillian Solomon Foundation about how quick, affordable and flexible adaptions can make public spaces safer for people, while increasing mobility and carving out new space in streets, parking lots and other public places.

In the summer of 2020, bench consulting partnered with the Solomon Foundation to assist with their "Streets for Recovery," a grant and technical assistance program for communities in implementing safe social distancing measures to reopen their local economies.  Read more at https://www.solomonfoundation.org/streetsforrecovery/

The Building Vibrant Communities podcast was the brainchild of Patronicity and Bench Consulting, but what is Patronicity and what is bench? This week we’re asking co-founder Ebrahim and one of the first program managers Mahala, to tell you more about Patronicity. We chat about the early days of the start-up and how it has grown to have impacted more than 935 projects, engaged more than 100,000 patrons and generated more than $36M of funding for better communities.

Beyond crowdgranting, they've also created Bench Consulting to take the learnings and experience from those projects to consult communities and organizations around the country on how to make more livable, lovable and supportive public places.

This week you'll hear from John Bry, the principal planner of Main Street Oakland County, the only county-wide Main Street organization in the country. You'll learn how John helped his Main Streets respond to COVID-19 with our Main Street Oakland County COVID-19 Small Business Relief Program. You won't believe how quickly these communities came together to support their small businesses or how much they were able to raise. John also shares tips for how Main Streets continue to adapt and build community in the current climate.

In this episode, we chat with Bud Tymczynszyn, a program manager at Community Builders, a

company focused on creating livable communities. Bud shares his experience in helping

communities solve real challenges and we dive deep into how it's not enough to ask your

community for input, it's important to "expand the tent" and provide real leadership opportunities.

We're sharing our conversation with Geng Wang the co-founder of Civic Champs, a platform designed to support nonprofits. He shares how their technology is helping organizations focus on what matters rather then getting bogged down in paperwork to make volunteering as seamless as possible. We also talk about what engagement means and Geng shares how Civic Champs is responding to COVID19 with their Helping Hands initiative.

Our guest, Kim Van Driel, the Director of Public Space Management at Downtown Grand Rapids Inc., is no stranger to shifting environments and constantly evolving community goals. But, nothing could have prepared her team for the dynamic pivot that was required in 2020 as a result of the pandemic and civil unrest. In this episode, she shares her teams' ongoing mission to create a vibrant, dynamic and inclusive downtown, while providing valuable experiences for everyone in a 4-season city.  In the past few months, Kim and her team have focused on creating outdoor social zones to allow for safe downtown commerce, empowered the black community to create public art in the wake of destructive rioting, and have expanded on their public art installations to include a powerful mural program focused on women's voices. Their ability to be agile and adaptive, and to share and learn from others, is helping them change the landscape of this evolving Midwestern city.

Lessons on How to Create Space for Your Community to "Do Better Work"  

In our efforts to support Main Streets across the country, we heard about Independent We Stand a marketing campaign from gasoline powered equipment producer Stihl. We wondered how a large corporation like Stihl started a movement to support small towns so we reached out to Bill Brunelle the co-founder and project manager to learn more. In this week's episode you'll learn why focusing on what's local can be good for the community and the bottom line.

When Carmen Lethig became Indiana's first ever placemaking manager she chose to work with Patronicity to develop the CreatINg Places program. In this week's podcast we dive into what's important about place, about how planners like Carmen can make better places, and what she hopes our future communities will look like.