midmag on cooltown studios

Cooltown Studios is always worth checking out. Yesterday's and today's entries especially because it's all about Midcoast Magnet! To best understand what Cooltown Studios is all about, go look at their pictures.

In their words, the Cooltown Studios goal is "to develop creative, sustainable, profitable urban buildings and destinations that serve as both a model and anchor for future surrounding development designed to attract creative, entrepreneurial markets that significantly impact the local economy and quality of life." Sound familiar? And yes, there are resources involved (money and developers).

Why does Neil include Midcoast Magnet this week? In part, because our work is like his work: we bring people together to foster excitement in our community, economically and culturally. Ours is not a top-down approach; we learn what steps to take by asking people in our community. You can see this in our 2006 Report to the Community.

Does this mean we're ready to build a "cooltown" development right here in the Midcoast? Is this something that could make a real impact on our community and economy? You tell me.

hometown economies

What did we do this summer? You mean aside from the Lobster Festival, the Blues Festival, the Boat Show, and the Arts Walks in Belfast and Rockland?

Well, we talked about economic development. Yippee!

Late in August, Maine Public Broadcasting came to town to shoot an episode of special called Hometown Economies. They chose Rockland as the place in Maine that best exemplifies the shift from an extracted resource/manufacturing economy toward a creative economy.

One evening at the Strand Theater, I sat on a panel that discussed, before a live audience, the developing economy of the Midcoast. It'll be broadcast on the 21st and 24th of this month on MPBN and is worth a look.

Here's a point that I made that I think bears reiteration: The great thing about the direction our economy is moving is that the creation of wealth is increasingly based on people's ability to access creativity and to innovate in their work, whether it's creating new products or adding value to existing industries. The opportunity that exists is that can be taught and trained, no matter where you live. And in the case of a place like Rockland, this means that people living in places that used to be depressed, are now seeing economic potential that they haven't seen in fifty or a hundred years.

The Mayor was sitting in the front row and afterward, he and I talked about how the story of Rockland isn't so much one of collapse and rebirth, but of constant redevelopment and adaptation. That's a good recipe for a company or a community.