Empty lot solution: add a stage 🎤

And then get people to use it.  View this email in your browser   Howdy Your downtown has an empty lot, right? Or a park where there used to be an empty lot?   I hear about a lot of towns turning old empty lots into small mini-parks or pocket parks. Sometimes, they put in a stage. There's a tiny one with a tiny stage in my hometown of Alva, Oklahoma, squeezed in between the library and the senior citizens center. There's a huge one with a big stage in Deb Brown's town Webster City, Iowa, that fills a bunch of lots on a corner. While having a stage and a park-like area around it is better than an empty lot, it's not much better if no one ever uses it. So how do you get people to use the stage?   Start by recruiting anyone who gives lessons in your town. Encourage them to use the stage for student performances.  music lessons voice lessons dance lessons drama lessons writing lessons (read out loud!)  summer student activities who else gives lessons?  You're training people to put on events there, attend events there, and to remember that the stage is there and available. Like any training project, it takes time and repetition. So you'll have to get the word out over and over. But start with people who give lessons. They're the easy first target.  Those formerly empty lots in Webster City were used for a big downtown concert for the community one June evening this year.  This is just one of the empty lot ideas that Deb Brown and I will be sharing on Tuesday evening. We're doing a live stream workshop called Filling the Downtown Gaps. We'll talk about empty lots and partially-collapsed buildings and how you can do something useful with them.  Filling the Downtown Gaps will cost US$20. It will be live on Tuesday July 12 at 6pm Central Daylight Time. (Find out what time that is in your time zone here.) The recording will be available from July 13-July 26 only. Once you're registered, you can schedule more than one viewing during the two week window so you reach as many people as possible. See you there?  Keep shaping the future of your town,  Becky PS -  Our live stream workshops are not like webinars you've sat through in the past. You see our faces. We connect with you personally. We give you a downloadable handout instead of boring slides, and we focus on real-world examples, not statistics. Your downloadable handout will have photos, more info and links for all the examples. We wrap up the presentation within one hour, then we stay late to answer your questions. And we take questions by email after the live event during the two weeks the replay is available. Invest an hour and $20 in the future of your downtown.    Like this idea? Boldly share:  Share Tweet Share +1 Forward to Friend  Unsubscribe New email address? Go here to update your profile. Want to refer a friend to get these weekly emails? Send them to sign up here. You received this email because you signed up for our email newsletter at one of our websites. (We are Becky McCray and Deb Brown, and our sites are smallbizsurvival.com, beckymccray.com, needalittleadvice.com and saveyour.town) You get the regular newsletter and notices when we offer products and services to help you shape the future of your town. SaveYour.Town PO Box 8 Hopeton, OK 73746 Add us to your address book   Powered by MailChimp   Did someone forward this to you? Sign up to get your own.