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Utilizing Small-Scale Manufacturing to Boost Local Economies with Ilana Preuss – Ep. 60About the GuestCan’t wait to share this next conversation with all of you. Today on the show I have Ilana Preuss, Founder & CEO of Recast City. She is the author of Recast Your City, co-author of Discovering Your Maker Economy and Made in PLACE: Small-scale manufacturing & neighborhood revitalization, and a chapter author for Creative Placemaking and Sustainable Nation. She is a TEDx speaker on, “The Economic Power of Great Places,” and a featured keynote speaker.​In this episode, we learn about the importance of small-scale manufacturing on the local economy, some examples of where this method and focus for stimulating economies has worked, and the five-step method for "recasting" your own City with small-scale manufacturing. There is tons of great information in this episode and I greatly appreciated Ilana for taking the time out of her very busy schedule to discuss this topic of Small-Scale Manufacturing and Boosting Local Economies.As always, if you have enjoyed the show, please subscribe to the show and share with your friends in the industry. There will be more exciting conversations on the shows to come. So without further ado, let’s start the show!

Show Notes

Matt (00:00):Hey, welcome to the show.Ilana (00:02):My pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me.Matt (00:04):Glad to have you on if you would just give us a little bit more about yourself to begin with, and then we'll kind of take that forward and, so kind of give us a Genesis of your professional background, and then we'll trail that into the book and your mission.Ilana (00:24):My pleasure. So my name is Ilana Preuss a city planner by training and I got into all of this work because I love places. I love downtowns. I love walking through places and it breaks my heart when I'm in a place that is clear not that it's unloved, but that people don't necessarily see the worth. And when I say people, it's not even necessarily people who live there, but it's the people who make the policy decisions or the investment decisions about that place. And for years, I worked in smart growth and community redevelopment, investing in downtowns and housing and transportation options. And over the years, I realized that we kept talking about jobs, housing balance, or, you know, mixed-use, but we never talked about what kind of businesses, what kind of jobs. And about 10 years ago, I went down a rabbit hole to try to figure out what kind of small businesses really do make.Ilana (01:19):The biggest difference for our neighborhoods really do make the biggest is difference for our economic resilience and really make the biggest difference for creating more equitable outcomes for more people both in neighborhoods, in bigger cities that have been historically excluded or neglected as well as rural smaller cities and towns that have been neglected in different ways. And I came aim to product businesses and these are, I call them small scale manufacturing. They're any business that creates a tangible product that you can replicate or package my shorthand for it is hot sauce, handbags, or hardware. The other one that occurred to me more recently is artisans to advance manufacturing. Okay. So it's really anybody who makes a, it can be food, it can be wood, it can be high tech, but it's, it's the product side of it because they can sell in person, they can sell online. And there is a very different kind of business for where we are right now with technology. But they're also accessible. People have a heritage of making things from every different part of our population. And so they're a, a really important part of our future economic development strategy.