Small Town Development
I spent some time trying to work with a couple of local non-profits. They both seemingly followed this formula for how to lift this small town out of poverty:1. Get a bunch of volunteers to work for free.2. Do X.3. ?????4. Suddenly, everyone in town is no longer poor!!!!!!
One of those two non-profits was a Main Street America program. The website for Main Street America is mainstreet.org, which suggests it's a not-for-profit organization itself.
To become an official Affiliate, you need to establish a non-profit economic development organization.
I was participating in these organizations hoping to network and establish myself as a local freelance writer and webmaster. There was already a local webmaster whose website work seemed to primarily be a means to get people to pay him for photography work (in addition to overcharging for his website work) because he really didn't know anything about website development and his websites were really lousy. He had trouble repointing a url when I had to briefly work with him while taking over some local websites for one of the two non-profits in question.
It was an extremely frustrating experience where both local "economic development" organizations were essentially useless -- or worse than useless -- in my quest to establish a freelance income on the ground. I mentioned this frustration on Hacker News and was told such organizations typically know nothing about business development.
Hacker News is a discussion forum and the funnel for Y Combinator, a tech venture capital firm that helped bring the world such big names as Reddit and Dropbox. My participation there helped make me aware that venture capitalists typically are people who created a successful business, sold it at a profit and are looking to reinvest that money in other businesses and perform stewardship to help foster their success.
So they make their money developing other for-profit businesses and their primary qualification for doing so is firsthand experience making money in a for-profit business themselves. Yet small town economic development organizations are typically non-profits and seem to follow the formula above of trying to get volunteers to do something for the city while knowing nothing about helping local people establish a business income.
I don't believe non-profits are typically qualified to do meaningful economic development. I don't believe people who run a non-profit likely know how to run a for-profit business because that's not what they do and my experience with the Main Street America program in Aberdeen, Washington suggests no one involved with that program had any clue how to help me succeed financially as a local freelancer and none of them genuinely was interested in doing economic development for Aberdeen.
They helped certain specific people -- their cronies -- get paid work, like the local radio personality doing extremely bad website work locally, but had absolutely no interest in helping a local competitor for him get established (me). Anyone in Aberdeen, Washington who really needed a serious website hired people from larger cities nearby because there was simply nothing local of adequate quality and nothing was being done by the two economic development organizations to change that fact.
Aberdeen, Washington is a town of around 16,000 people. The Main Street America program has three tiers of town size and above 5000 people, you are expected to have a full-time paid Executive Director.
I was doing resume work, website work and freelance writing and dreaming of being hired by the local Main Street program as my dream job. I eventually concluded that if I needed to do enough website work and resume work etc. as the Executive Director to cover my own salary plus other expenses for the organization, like an office, I would probably be better off running a consultancy from home with less overhead.
At a later date, I learned that the city of Aberdeen was paying the local Main Street program a substantial chunk of money. I believe they were covering the costs of the salary for their only employee and may have also been providing a free office for them.
If you are a city below 2500 people, the requirement is a part-time volunteer Executive Director. If you are above 2500 people, you are supposed to hire a paid part-time Executive Director and above 5000 people it's supposed to be a paid full-time Executive Director.
I don't know if it is the norm for Main Street programs to get financial support from city coffers. If that is their typical financing model, I strongly encourage you to crunch some numbers and figure out how much NEW business they would need to attract year in and year out to justify paying that amount of money.
I don't believe it makes any sense for a small town to pay that kind of money to a local economic development non-profit year in and year out. You would probably need exponential local growth for that to make ANY sense.
Because IF they manage to bring in enough NEW (presumably recurring) taxes year one to cover the costs involved for the city, if they don't repeat that success next year, you can FIRE them on the spot and pocket that money every additional year. If they do NOT cover the costs of what you are paying out of city coffers, why are you paying them at all? Fire them, invest that money in something else that actually benefits your citizens and be permanently better off.
If someone wants to start a Main Street America affiliate in YOUR town, I strongly suggest you wish them luck and decline to give them money out of city coffers. I don't believe they bring enough value to the table to justify the expense.
I believe it amounts to a government pork barrel with zero local accountability. Whatever glowing reports you read to the contrary from current Affiliates should be viewed with a jaundiced eye.
They require the program to track various metrics, such as new businesses in downtown. When I was in Aberdeen, I learned that the influx of new businesses in downtown were all refugees from a dying mall elsewhere in the city.
The local Main Street program was probably taking credit for this influx of new businesses in downtown but it didn't represent new income for the city. It also was in no way due to the existence of the Main Street program. Those businesses would have found someplace to move in town after the mall closed without a Main Street program existing at all.
The Main Street America program probably amounts to fraud and probably deserves to be taken down by a class action suit. If you are a small town, I suggest you not let them waste another minute of your time or another dime of your money.
One of their supposedly "basic" requirements that theoretically should be completed early on is a style guide for your downtown. I think that's a wonderful idea but you shouldn't waste your limited resources reinventing the wheel. They should offer a set of style guides for program participants.
I think that's such a wonderful idea, I wrote my own, possibly before I learned that was something they theoretically required early on for new affiliates (which I don't believe the program in Aberdeen ever bothered to do and that fact didn't cost them their affiliate status). You are free to use it:
At one time, I had hoped to establish Eclogiselle as a for-profit business offering planning and economic development services for small towns. My understanding is that most for-profit private planning firms will not take a job for less than $5000. My goal was to offer services for less than that figure which made business sense for me and for my clients.
I was badly burned by the people in Aberdeen, Washington. I don't know if I even WANT to pursue this as a business venture and I also don't know how to establish a list of services and prices.
I believe small towns are basically being thrown to the wolves because existing programs in this space don't work.
The following are examples of my work:
Downtown Aberdeen was originally developed as a website for the local Main Street program because I was being told I might get another shot at the Executive Director job to which I had applied. I eventually cut out all parts of the site talking like I was the Executive Director and published it as a sample of my work.
Please note that I have a Certificate in GIS from the world's leading GIS program and most maps on the above sample sites are my handiwork.
I've also run Reddits for multiple small towns. I believe r/SewardNE still has my description for it though I gave it away because I'm not local. I still own r/manhattanks (Manhattan, KS).
See also: Samples of my website work for hire