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She uses place-based economic development to build economic opportunity for more people.
Ilana spent some time with us earlier and shared some of her important work.
So, after her prerecorded keynote presentation today, she’ll also be here live to answer your questions.
So, before we hear her presentation, I want to remind everyone about the Slido platform.
c’mon enjoy this incredible keynote from Ilana Preuss, which lasts about 20 minutes.
And again, after her presentation, we’ll have Ilana here live for Q&A.
Mike and I will see you on the other side.
Ilana Preuss:Hi, thank you for having me at the AARP Livable Communities Conference.
It’s great to be here with all of you.
The soul of our community, to me, is really about what makes our place special.
The cost of renovation is very high right now because the cost of construction is very high.
In addition to that, we have a lot of big box stores that hold a guaranteed lease.
On top of that, we have this mismatch of real estate going on.
There’s very large spaces and a lot of folks who need pretty small spaces.
But what are we all looking to do?
What are we looking to get?
We’re looking to get places where people can come together.
A little bit about myself.
On the left, you could see this amazing electric blue dress.
It’s one that my mother sewed for me.
It was something that we all shared with everybody in our family.
Oh, and of course, my kids are a base part of that as well.
But that’s really where this all comes together with what we are talking about.
That’s both historically and today.
We have a history of excluding some people and some places.
And what do we do about it now?
We need to acknowledge that we’re starting in a tough place.
We have lost over a million lives to COVID.
This impacts our families.
This impacts our communities.
This impacts our local economies.
It’s impacting the people in our communities and it’s certainly impacting the small businesses in our community.
On top of that, we had this great re-shifting of employment.
It was called the great resignation, then the great shift.
And that includes remote work and its impact to our downtowns.
Eighty percent of all of our counties were already seeing a decline in the working-age adult population.
That’s the brain drain of the youth leaving.
That’s the aging of our boomers.
That is all different pieces going on at the same time to impact our local economies.
And we know that this is an enormous impact on both our urban and rural communities as well.
On top of all that, we’ve had a great, huge shift in retail use.
The major national chains consolidated the number of locations.
Many of them actually shrank the square footage of their stores.
You’re only going to see these national chains in really prime locations with strong foot traffic already.
What is going to be supporting every different part of their population in that area?
So what does all of this have to do with vacant storefronts, older entrepreneurship and great places?
It’s a good thing you’ve asked because we’re, in fact, at this transformational moment.
This is where small-scale manufacturing comes into the solution.
Let me tell you who they are just briefly.
My shorthand for it is hot sauce, handbags or hardware everything from artisans to advanced manufacturing.
Let me give you one example.
This is Sio Ceramics.
Sio Ceramics creates ceramic jewelry the most vibrant colors you’ve ever seen.
Sio Ceramics has a micro retail storefront, 400 square feet in an artisan walkway of micro retail spaces.
They do sell wholesale nationally and they sell at major markets, major pop-up markets in the local area.
That means better paying jobs, right?
Small-scale manufacturing jobs pay 50 to 100 percent more than retailer service jobs on average.
That means a person being able to build their personal wealth and their household wealth.
It’s not dependent on the foot traffic to be able to have a strong and growing business.
Here’s another example.
This is Woodhaven Custom Calls.
They’re out of a small, rural town in Alabama.
They make turkey calls.
Now, this is a production space.
This is not a retail space and it’s not a production and retail space.
It’s just 25 people making all of these products a block off of main street.
They could be part of the amenity, part of the attraction to bringing people to this small town.
So this is also small-scale manufacturing.
We see it in other ways as well.
This is a huge way to help people make that step.
And we’re seeing these grow all over the country.
There are also in larger cities older industrial buildings that can be turned into multi-tenant spaces.
It is about a different way to invest in our people, our main street and our community.
And I promise you that there are small-scale manufacturers in your community because they are everywhere.
We need to invest in that place with those people.
Is it a neighborhood main street?
What is the place where these businesses can come and really create and grow their businesses?
There is such a need right now for support.
And the small-scale manufacturers are really this hidden gem, this missing piece that are part of the solution.
They create a number of benefits within our community.
It allows us to build a more inclusive opportunity to bring wealth into the community.
They’re quite literally bringing dollars into that place.
They’re not dependent on the storefront on the traffic but they can fill storefronts.
We can have space that is production and retail in the same space.
This woman, as you’re able to see, has a soap business.
Thats an efficient business model because she doesn’t need other staff to manage the space.
She doesn’t need other space to do her production.
She can do production and retail in the same space.
It draws us into the community.
This is the Zekes Coffee, a great coffee maker.
This space is a coffee store up front and a coffee roaster and wholesale distributor out the back.
This business could move into that space because of the wholesale distribution out the back.
They were not going to be making or breaking it based on foot traffic at the beginning.
Knoxville, Tennessee is a great example of this.
They have been working with small-scale manufacturers they call them maker businesses for years now.
So, all of these things are part of a thriving community.
Additionally, they found that they needed to change their zoning.
So it’s zoning and then it’s the permitting.
Once you get the zoning changed, how do you actually get something through the permitting process?
So, this is all about making something happen.
So, what are we doing to take action?
And here are a few ways we get there.
One, we need to create more equitable access to storefronts.
Are the storefronts the right sizes?
Do we need to work with property owners to create micro retail spaces?
What’s the funding we need to provide behind that?
How do we create shared retail spaces or shared production spaces if that’s what we need?
Second, there are real opportunities to fill vacant storefronts by launching pop-ups to permanent growth plans.
So, it might be an outdoor pop-up event.
It’s not a one-off event.
It’s part of this pipeline of growth.
Then we also need to think about how we’re matching existing funding and investment resources.
Do you have a revolving loan fund in your community?
Is there a CDFI that can help you?
Is there a local bank you’re free to work with?
The lack of financing for small-scale manufacturing businesses is vast.
So how are we helping facilitate that?
And then really thinking about how we build community pride.
Who benefits from each of our investments is a key piece of that.
We want to confirm we’re benefiting our legacy business owners.
We want to double-check we’re benefiting immigrant community members.
Where our local residents are the business owners, they’re providing good paying jobs within the community.
It takes leadership, right?
All of this takes leadership.
It takes people taking a stand and saying, this is important.
We need to invest in our local business owners We need to invest in our local places.
I’m not saying it’s easy, but I’m saying it’s totally doable.
Thank you very much.
Mike Watson:Well, I hope you enjoyed that video as much as we did.
And we’re now very fortunate to have Ilana Preuss with us here live to answer your questions.
Ilana, thank you so much for being here with us today.
Ilana Preuss:My pleasure.
Mike Watson:Awesome.
We’ll use this throughout the rest of the day.
So, we’re going to jump into our first one.
Ilana, you showed a statistic during your presentation.
It was a graph.
It showed the stark contrast between metro areas and rural areas in terms of job growth and business growth.
And one of the questions that we have here is on that topic.
It might be a textile mill that used to be there.
It might be a lumberyard that used to be there.
There might be some industry or some transportation hub that used to be there.
And so, a lot of rural communities are still these amazing places, but they have empty downtowns.
Their Main Street has a dozen vacant, decaying buildings but they have amazing people there.
So the question then is, what do you do about it?
They are bringing dollars into that community.
They are selling online.
They’re doing wholesale distribution.
Mike Watson:Great answer, and I think leads into this next question.
You kind of mentioned some of those stores that have closed.
I assume there’s some great advice you have to offer there on the small-scale manufacturing front and others.
Ilana Preuss:The big box stores are hard.
I mean, I will readily admit that.
That is a structure that was created for a singular purpose.
We have seen some of the older Kmart footprints being reused.
It takes a very creative developer.
It takes some very specific investment.
So they’re really engaging with the community, but they are doing large-scale production as well.
Ilana Preuss:Pop-ups are a great method.
It’s not a one-off event.
It’s part of how are we incubating businesses to help them grow?
How are we helping them reach a broader market?
So we want to look at all of those policies from the perspective of our small business owners.
So, we want to simplify that process as well.
Mike Watson:That’s really good guidance.
How can we make economic growth and economic development beneficial for all groups in the economy?
Anytime we’re spending time or money or energy on something, we’re investing resources.
And so, at the very beginning, we ask this question about what is our goal?
What is that outcome we’re trying to achieve?
Let’s be really specific about it.
Ilana Preuss:My pleasure.
Thank you so much for having me today.
Mike Watson:Thank you.
It was wonderful to have you.
Now I’m going to kick it back to Carly to take us on in our program.
Carly Roszkowski:Thanks, Mike.
Thank you again to Ilana for joining us live.
We’re now going to share a video highlighting a project from the AARP Community Challenge grant program.
Since 2017, the AARP Community Challenge has awarded $16.3 million through more than 1,370 grants.
