In addition to perennial Main Street Approach content, Main Street Now 2024 sessions will highlight three key themes:

Welcoming & Belonging: Welcoming and belonging strategies help build bridges between new and existing residents, business owners, visitors, and other stakeholders to create stronger bonds within communities. Successful Main Streets foster a sense of community ownership for each resident by ensuring equal access to, and a role in, downtown for people from all backgrounds, including incomes, ages, races, and abilities. Whether it’s welcoming new neighbors, championing strategies to prevent gentrification or displacement, adopting immigrant-friendly policies, or creating space for group expression, Main Street organizations are well-positioned to advance these principles and strengthen their districts’ social, civic, and economic fabric. 

Connectivity through Civic Infrastructure: Civic infrastructure - parks, trails, town squares, play spaces, libraries, and other public places – boosts local economies, increases resiliency and trust, supports health and well-being, creates a more equitable society, increases civic engagement, and strengthens democracy for all. Underlying a community’s civic infrastructure is a system of interconnected policies, programs, and people that work in tandem to build and foster a sense of place. Main Streets share in the community-wide need to dedicate time and resources towards expanding access and use of civic infrastructure to enhance quality of life and create more sustainable communities with vibrant social capital. 

Reimagining Local Spaces & Economies: Major economic transformations over the past decade – from real estate market conditions and pandemic disruptions to macro-economic shifts and local entrepreneurship trends – have presented local communities with myriad challenges. In response, Main Streets have adopted future-focused solutions to leverage their place-based assets, remain competitive, and reorient their economic bases for local prosperity. To adapt in an ever-changing landscape, Main Streets can support local investment and ownership in their districts, activate underutilized spaces through creative reuse, champion people-centered infrastructure, and bolster grassroots economic vitality strategies.  

Big City Focus  
Neighborhood commercial corridors in larger cities employing the Main Street Approach face specific challenges related to bureaucracy, infrastructure, and long-term disinvestment. Big City Focus sessions bring specific insights to practitioners in these corridors and opportunities to connect with peers. 

Civic Leader  
Civic support for Main Street is essential to creating a thriving district. Sessions in this track will give Civic Leaders – whether elected officials or public administrators – tools and insights on the why and how of supporting downtown revitalization through a Main Street program.  

Climate Resiliency  
Environmental changes create ongoing challenges for Main Street programs to adapt infrastructure and plans to be resilient in the face of change. These select sessions contain guidance and ideas to lay groundwork for more adaptation of programs, and tools to be aware of in anticipation of climate change impacts.  

Core Concepts  
The foundations of the Main Street Approach remain essential to building a strong revitalization effort. Core Concepts sessions will help your program build a stable base for revitalization through best practices and case study examples.  

Design for All  
The power of design in a revitalization effort is the ability to transform spaces – through preservation, zoning, placemaking, and place-branding – to be inviting and useful to all district stakeholders. Join these sessions for best practices and dialogue about small changes with a big impact on a district’s physical environment.

Sponsored by Philip A. Morris Fund for the Design Arts, a fund at the Community Foundation of Greater Birmingham

Digital Promotion  
Utilizing digital tools has become one of the most impactful ways for Main Street programs to promote local. The ability to leverage technology translates into economic and social impact. These sessions help guide Main Streets to new ideas to put into action to bring digital downtown. 

Equity & Inclusion  
The unequal impacts of the pandemic – and the continued reckoning with longstanding racial injustices – emphasize the need for Main Street districts to prioritize equity and inclusion as a key tool to rebuilding local economies. Sessions in this track will help us understand the ways that Main Street programs can break down barriers and center diversity. 

Historic Preservation  
The preservation and rehabilitation of historic buildings and spaces in Main Street districts requires specific tools and resources. These sessions address strategies and replicable ideas for Main Street and commercial district programs to better address the physical maintenance of historic built environment assets. 

Sponsored by The 1772 Foundation

Leadership  
Every Main Street leader is called upon to respond to the needs and concerns of our communities. Through these sessions, we look to opportunities to reflect, to regroup, and to build on our knowledge of how to lead our organizations effectively.  

Making the Case  
Measuring and communicating the value of Main Street is essential to advocating for resources for recovery. This series of sessions is focused on developing the message of your Main Street program with data, research, and tools to help illustrate the need for and impact of commercial district revitalization.  

Rural Focus  
In the smallest of communities, Main Street programs play an outsized role in transformational change to develop local economic power. These sessions will shed light on case studies and practices employed by place management organizations in rural communities. 

Supporting Entrepreneurs    
Main Street research demonstrates that 70% of Main Street businesses are grown from within the community. In these sessions, gain skills and knowledge about the ways that Main Street programs can focus on creating an environment that fosters entrepreneurship. 

Sponsored by U.S. Bank

Mobile Workshop 
Off-site, ticketed immersive learning excursion to a Birmingham neighborhood or surrounding Alabama community. All mobile workshops will depart from the BJCC East 1st Floor, near the registration desk. Please arrive 15 minutes prior to the listed departure time. Tickets cannot be purchased at the bus or tour location. 

30-Minute Tactical Solution Sessions 
Succinct sessions focused on key examples from Main Street communities and partner content through sponsors.   

45-Minute Crash Courses 
Topic-specific courses that provide quick information or skill-building.   

75-Minute Classroom Sessions 
Panel discussions or conversations on a topic with opportunities for audience engagement.  

Deep Dive Sessions 
Highly interactive 1.5 to three-hour workshops on topics that require detailed instruction or discussion.