With the rising temperatures comes a busy schedule. One of the things we added as Grow Clinton was an awesome tool that aggregates the community events from the internet. It isn’t perfect, but it is getting better. And it creates a great snapshot of all the activities that are happening in town. Check out the community calendar here.
We are all about building community. We are trying to build an artist community. A group of us received a state grant to accelerate our art scene. On Friday April 11, we are offering an artist workshop to discuss community placemaking. We hope to see established and aspiring artists at this workshop. We have applied for additional funding as we hope to be able to seed numerous placemaking projects.
We are building the entrepreneurship hub. To do this, we regularly host Conor from the SBDC. On April 29, we will have a workshop from 2-3pm on marketing your small business. Conor and I are always available to workshop any business idea as well. These confidential one-on-one meetings help you identify customers, strategies, and income streams.
Leadership continues to be a huge push of Grow Clinton. We have our monthly Leadership Unlocked programs. These are on the third Wednesdays from 2pm-3pm. April’s session is about Conflict Management.
We continue to work with the Downtown on multiple initatives. The first is we have sent out a RFP to create a historic district for the downtown. We are working with Hometown Pride and DCA to create a survey to kickstart some development ideas. Our office is also hosting the Hometown Hero banner registration. This partnership is going to drive results. Check us out this summer for a Music on the Avenue Biz After 5.
I am also the Kiwanis President. We are working on a super cool literacy program with the school district. We will be purchasing books to sprinkle in every place a kid might be at. Our library will again have the Clinton Reads Challenge where we compete with Clintons around the country in the most hours reading. We won last year. We have also applied for a few grants to help replenish the books as time goes on. We are also a member of the Scholastic Book program that allows us to buy more books at a reduced rate.
Then the biggest community development project is a year long endeavor by Joe Howard to capture as many of the events and attractions Clinton has to offer as his schedule allows. We will have a playlist on our YouTube page. He has over 60 events and attractions he hopes to get to. He is just one person, so we can’t get to everything. But overall, we are going to create a super high energy 3 minute Soul of Clinton, Iowa video. In the meantime check our facebook page and Youtube for vlogs of his adventures.
We are growing our community through exposure and direct programming. If you have a program idea, please reach out to me at mparbs@growclinton.com. We are always looking for ways to continue to provide the resources to develop all facets of our community.