Heritage Consulting Inc.'s Downtown Revitalization Experience

Heritage Consulting has developed a wide range of interactive and worthwhile training oppotunities for our commercial district revitalization and Main Street clients. In the past 19 years, we have consulted with organizations and government agencies on many issues to make organizations more effective.  Listed here are the 2024  presentations that we have developed for clients.  See Donna's vita here. 

We have completed work on the second edition of our 2007 book published by Rowman & Littlefield/AASLH New Solutions for House Museums: Ensuring the Long Term Preservation of America's Historic Houses. This book is the best seller in the American Association for State and Local History series, as we understand it from AASLH since its publication in 2007. The new edition was published in November 2020

Our workshops and training programs can be as detailed as you wish: from one hour to a full day in length.  See the 2024 edition of our workshop/consultation list here. We are happy to develop training programs or consultations on other topics to suit your needs. Downtown management organizations, whether using the Main Street Four-Point Approach™ or another organizing methodology, struggle to grow and thrive. We know because we have worked with more than 150 downtown organizations in the last fourteen years to advance their agendas and make a difference in their community. At its heart, downtown organizations are the people who volunteer or manage these critical enterprises and our training programs are designed specifically for them.

We also work with clients on long term projects such as creating the first time design guidlines for a community with a longstanding historic preservation ordinance. We produced over four months, a 160 page, lavishly illustrated, full color, design guidelines for Haddon Heights NJ Historic Preservation Commission in June 2021.

For the Oregon Main Street program we produced a 76 page Policies and Procedures Manual for Main Street organizations. This document has an extensive personnel policies section which is written specifically for Oregon Law. You will have to up date this section for use in your state. 

For the Oregon Main Street Program we produced a 65 page handbook to encourage soliciation of individuals to support local Main Street organizations.  This document called Increasing Your Main Street’s Financial Stability:  Turning Supporters into Donors contains 15 sample documents and detailed instruction on starting a multi channel investor campaign to raise funds. 

Any one of our 70 workshops are excellent for statewide or regional conferences, group training or local downtown management organizations. Our workshops are hands-on, engaging and fun. We include several hands-on learning experiences during each workshop, and offer stories from our experiences, and practical solutions that can be used immediately. We prefer to offer peer learning opportunities during these workshops so that the audience can learn from their contemporaries as well as from Ms. Harris. We provide an extensive packet of information for each workshop participant that includes a bibliography, articles, checklists and forms as resources to reinforce the content of the workshop. We ask all participants to evaluate every one of our workshops so we can include continuous improvement in our sessions. A list of our consultations for downtown clients can be found here. Update April 2024