Main Spotlight: Building Partnerships for Main Street Success

In 2023, Main Street America was selected as a lead capacity builder for the US Department of Transportation’s Thriving Communities Program (TCP). With a $5.9 million award from USDOT, Main Street America is supporting 20 rural and tribal communities across the country with their transportation and community development priorities, together with a team of technical assistance providers: CTL Engineering, Equiticity, National Association of Development Organizations, Project for Public Spaces, Rails-to-Trails Conservancy, and Rural Community Assistance Partnership.

This article is informed by work with 20 communities in the TCP. In particular, we recognize the staff at Shoalwater Bay Indian Tribe: Quintin Swanson, Risa Thomas, Cynthia Toop, and many more.

This article also draws on work by Main Street America’s team of organizations, in close partnership with the U.S. Department of Transportation (USDOT), particularly the National Association of Development Organizations (Carrie Kissel, Bret Allphin), and the Rural Community Assistance Corporation (Carol Cohen, Amy Williams).

This is a unique, historical time where there is substantial investment and support from the federal government. Through strategic funding and robust partnerships, communities have the opportunity to maximize their local technical assistance efforts that will bring transformational impact for generations to come. 

Through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL), communities now have access to historic investments that address climate, economic development and a variety of infrastructure needs. To make the most of these transformational commitments, through the Thriving Communities Network (TCN), Federal Agencies are providing coordinated resources to underserved communities, much like we see through the Thriving Communities Program. It is through this whole government approach alongside regional partnerships that communities are now able to overcome the barriers between federal funding and the projects that need attention most.

Last fall, when I joined the Main Street America team to work on the Thriving Communities Program with the US Department of Transportation, our team’s first big task was to get to know the 20 communities (located across 21 states) assigned to our cohort. From the Pacific to Atlantic coasts, our diverse cohort of TCP communities range in size from small towns to larger regions and include five federally recognized tribes. Through this work, we have seen the importance of building and maintaining a strong network of partners. The Shoalwater Bay Indian Tribe (SBIT) provides a strong example of the importance of partnerships and our work with them has showed us how Main Streets can build broad base of robust partners.

Getting to Know the Shoalwater Bay Indian Tribe

The Shoalwater Bay Indian Tribe may be one of the smallest federally recognized tribes, but the ambition and energy of this community is huge! Shoalwater Bay reservation is located on Willapa Bay off the coast of Washington, where people of Lower Chehalis and Lower Chinook descent have lived, fished, hunted, and harvested shellfish for thousands of years. Today, SBIT operates community services and housing. Its enterprises include a hotel, casino, retail stores, and Shoalwater Seafood. During our TCP assessment visit, we learned how the tribe is growing its oyster business with new and emerging technologies, and we had the amazing opportunity to sample their Toke Point oysters. (Learn more about Shoalwater Seafood on their Main Street Business Insights podcast episode.)

Indigenous accounts and scientific records show that the Pacific Northwest was devastated by an earthquake and tsunami in 1700, triggered by the Cascadia Subduction Zone. Today, the region, and Shoalwater Bay, remains at risk of a repeat of this catastrophic event. In addition, accelerating coastal erosion and sea level rise are diminishing SBIT’s land and threatening the reservation.

The tribe has been proactive in pursuing resiliency in the face of these hazards. They constructed and maintained a berm to slow the pace of erosion and built a state-of-the-art tsunami evacuation tower in the town of Tokeland. SBIT has been acquiring new uphill lands for the relocation of housing and services to higher ground that will be safer and more resilient for generations to come. SBIT is already managing over $30 million in grants to create a master plan, extend the first infrastructure, and build the first set of homes in the new uphill area.

SBIT’s complex upland move has required many outside partners from the region, state, and federal levels. Their staff have long seen the importance of these partnerships to build on the tribe’s capacity to pursue funding for these generational projects.

Main Street is a Team Sport

Transportation projects have a lot of complexity, and they often impact systems that stretch beyond the immediate local context. It is almost impossible for one agency or entity to advance transportation projects — you need a chain or network of individuals or organizations collaborating in a partnership. This framework also applies to Main Street work. When considering a network of partnerships, our partners at the National Association of Development Organizations (NADO) and Rural Community Assistance Corporation (RCAC) have found it useful to organize this team into different roles:

• Demand Partners: People or groups who will use the project. For transportation, that could be diverse types of users, including people of all ages and abilities, businesses who need to transport or receive freight and goods, commuters getting to work, users seeking recreation or exercise, etc.
• Transactional Partners: People or groups who play a role in producing the project. For transportation, that can be professional services and construction firms.
• Support Partners: People or groups that support the production of the project. For transportation, this includes organizations that align funding or technical assistance toward projects.
• “The Coordinator:” In the partnership mapping framework we’ve explored with NADO, it’s important to identify a central coordinator for a partnership: a designated person or people at the lead organization who maintain these relationships and ensure effective communication.

Crafting Your Network of Partners

Partnerships are powerful for all Main Street work, and our work through the TCP has helped us build a deeper understanding of how to build and maintain robust partnerships. Here are our key pieces of advice:

1. Meet Your Partners Face to Face

Inviting potential partners to meet with you in person is a powerful tool to build engagement and investment. As part of our TCP work, we are facilitating on-site assessments in every TCP community. Each multi-day workshop focuses on inviting important regional and statewide partners to talk about local challenges — in person! Through collaboration with USDOT and the Thriving Communities Network, we were also able to connect with experts from relevant federal agencies.

In Shoalwater Bay, SBIT had engaged with many of its partners long before planning our first TCP visit, but not all of them had seen the challenges firsthand. SBIT staff organized an incredible visit where these partners toured important sites and to see and understand the tribe’s progress to date. During the SBIT visit, the Main Street America TCP team facilitated partnership mapping and action planning workshops that began to document how a diverse collection of partners can work together to support SBIT.

Across our 20 TCP communities, our local partners have been able to secure participation from regional planning organizations, state departments of transportation, federal agencies, philanthropic foundations, community based organizations, housing councils, tourism agencies, art centers, and more.

2. Document Your Partnership Landscape

For successful ongoing partnerships, it’s important to know what role a partner may play in each transportation goal (what resources they bring to the table) and why they might be interested (what does their organization get out of the partnership to advance their own mission). Keeping a record of these motivations and roles is important in managing diverse partnerships. 

Partnerships also represent personal relationships — so as staff members change, the structure of the partnerships may fray or become lost. A strong documentation process can smooth out these changes and ensure consistent communication. 

In Shoalwater Bay, we came up with the idea for a partnership Rolodex as a way to document the structure of a partnership and the individual contacts within. We wanted a tool that could help any individual or organization in the group identify their role and see the roles of others to maximize connections across the groups. We also wanted a tool to support a small staff as they hold together and manage institutional relationships, especially as the organization adds new staff members or experiences turnover.

Our team members at the National Association of Development Organizations are leading the development of a useful tool to map and track a system of partnerships for every TCP community. The tool will help these communities as they develop transportation priorities and pursue competitive grants. They can use the tool to:

• Develop a broader story about the purpose and need for the project they are developing.
• Identify actionable roles for project partners.
• Identify additional resources that could be contributed to the project (in-kind, etc.).
• Develop more detailed and specific letters of commitment from project participants.

3. Think Outside the Box

You may have a list of partners that you turn to when developing new projects, but it can also be helpful to look outside your existing relationships to identify new partners who can strengthen your work. Try these four questions to go beyond the list of usual suspects and broaden your partnership landscape:

1. Who is already working in your community to build or protect assets like health and wellbeing, physical infrastructure, natural resources, and more?
2. Who is not usually at the table to plan and implement projects (low-income households, youth or older adults, new residents, people with limited English proficiency, people of color, others)?
3. Who is already working with those underserved populations?
4. What private sector entities might care about your transportation initiative?

Beyond the Thriving Communities Program

Main Streets are part of our transportation infrastructure, but they’re also a powerful platform for transformation in thriving communities. While transportation projects can seem like a tall order for small, resource-strapped organizations, an individual or group of any size can take the lead to map out and identify a supportive system of partners.

But my experience with the Shoalwater Bay Indian Tribe and other partners goes beyond transportation. In all Main Street work, individuals and small groups can leverage partnerships to have transformative impacts. I hope you can apply the lessons I have learned through the TCP — meeting partners face to face, documenting our partnership landscape, and thinking outside the box — to your next project, partnership, or initiative.

Learn more about the thriving communities program