Design Studio Winchester opened on Main Street in downtown Winchester last August. The creative studio, in partnership with the city of Winchester, UK’s College of Design, and UK’s Community and Economic Development Initiative of Kentucky, is a hub for creating and sharing ideas about community development.
When addressing the challenges and opportunities of small-town Main Streets in Kentucky, it helps to start with a Main Street address. That’s the idea behind the creation of Design Studio Winchester, a new base of operations for creative design, community engagement and economic development, stationed right on the main thoroughfare of Winchester, Kentucky.
The creative studio at 11 South Main St., which opened at the end of August last year, is a joint project between the city of Winchester and local stakeholders, the University of Kentucky’s College of Design, and UK’s Community and Economic Development Initiative of Kentucky (CEDIK), a part of the College of Agriculture, Food and Environment. The new center houses design space for UK students and faculty to work on-site, along with flexible gathering space for a variety of community-driven uses, from business workshops organized by the Bluegrass Small Business and Development Center to programming arranged through Clark County’s Cooperative Extension office. Visitors can attend events, inspect a table-sized 3-D model of the city of Winchester, or peruse the shop’s festive front window displays.
“We are really trying to celebrate downtowns, and one of the best ways we can do that is by investing in downtowns,” said Ryan Sandwick, community design program manager for CEDIK and UK’s department of landscape architecture. “It helps us ground our work and our effort in the reality of the community. … It makes us much more accessible, and it really helps us understand what their needs are.”
‘We come in as a team’
The idea for a place-based design studio originated with UK College of Design associate professor Anthony Roccanova, Sandwick said, but bringing together UK’s diverse expertise to engage communities in addressing economic development challenges is CEDIK’s bailiwick.
The studio is one of many ways that CEDIK works to help fulfill UK’s land-grant mission to further the priorities of communities across the commonwealth. CEDIK draws on the talent of faculty and staff from the agricultural economics, community and leadership development, and landscape architecture departments within the College of Agriculture, Food and Environment, and it also partners closely on projects with the College of Design, the College offine Arts, the Bluegrass Small Business Development Center, and UK’s Cooperative Extension office.
“We come in as a team, which is really a fundamental shift in how community and economic development is done in Kentucky,” said Alison Davis, CEDIK’s executive director, who has led the agency since it was launched by UK 10 years ago. “The reason why CEDIK has been a useful resource is because no one person has the same background as any other. And when you have people who are community designers and artists, they can get really creative.”
Building community
In 2019, CEDIK assisted in more than 50 communities across the state, Davis said. The specific needs of each community can vary, but CEDIK focuses primarily on five areas: economic development, leadership development, community design, healthy communities and arts engagement.
The group’s services include a bevy of community assessment, local engagement and strategic planning options, depending on what the community is looking to accomplish. Its business retention and expansion program is designed to help local companies feel valued, to address the needs of their workforce and to access the resources they need to grow and expand. Its downtown revitalization program has been actively engaged in counties across the commonwealth this year, particularly in southeastern Kentucky. The agency also assisted Kentucky hospitals in completing community health needs assessments as required by the Affordable Care Act.
Through its first Impressions program, CEDIK helps communities view themselves from an outsider’s perspective, by sending in anonymous evaluators to report their experiences. The agency then compiles the results, offers strategic recommendations and guides community groups as they decide how to address concerns.
“It’s a high-value, low-cost program, and it quickly leads to action. Often by the time they are out of the first session, something has already been checked off the list.” —Alison Davis, executive director of CEDIK
“It’s a high-value, low-cost program, and it quickly leads to action,” Davis said. “Often by the time they are out of the first session, something has already been checked off the list.”
CEDIK also works to make locally relevant data available and accessible to communities to help them better evaluate the opportunities and challenges they face. “We find that communities, in the absence of good data, they will use bad data,” Davis said.
CEDIK works in close concert with Cooperative Extension, which recently completed an extensive assessment of community needs for each county across the state. CEDIK has processed the information collected by extension agents through roughly 31,000 surveys and 500 focus groups into county-specific reports focused around key community development topics, Davis said. The reports can be accessed on CEDIK’s website, cedik.ca.uky.edu.
Common challenges, customized solutions
Although every community is different in its strengths and its needs, all communities are often working to overcome similar challenges, Davis said. Community leaders are under constant pressure to keep existing jobs and attract more, and many small towns are worried about losing their young adults to bigger cities with more opportunities.
There aren’t any easy answers, Davis said, but focusing on the long-term returns of community development investments, working to groom good leaders, embracing regional cooperation, and focusing on a community’s existing assets are some good starting points. And keeping communities actively engaged in the process is key.
That’s where initiatives like Design Studio Winchester come into play, and the brick-and- mortar downtown presence is already sparking conversation. In the fall, Sandwick set up a March Madness-style bracket of possible low-budget community improvement projects, inviting community members to cast “votes” for their highest priorities with donations of personal care products for the local teen center. The winning project was a call for canopy seating along an elevated section of the Main Street sidewalk called “High Side,” no easy task with the limited funding available.
Community members voted to create canopy seating along a portion of Winchester’s Main St. as part of a temporary community improvement project.
They draped bold blue and green fringed streamers across the sidewalk to create more shade, with café-style tables and chairs set up underneath it. Some people loved it, and some thought it was tacky, Sandwick said. Either way, people were engaged and sharing opinions on a key downtown asset, and one that had already been targeted for improvement as a key component in the city’s 2015 master plan.
“Even though it was only up for six weeks, it got people talking,” Sandwick said. The studio is now working with the city toward more incremental implementation projects based on the master plan, including finding new ways to highlight High Side and make it more ADA accessible and pedestrian friendly.
“What’s great about Winchester is that there’s already so much momentum, so we were really jumping onto a moving train,” Sandwick said.
The hope is that the Main Street studio concept could eventually be replicated across the state, possibly with a more regional focus in some areas, to benefit other communities like Winchester.
We are tailoring all our resources here for Winchester specifically, and we would do the same for any other community,” Sandwick said. “It’s not just design and planning for the sake of design and planning, but how do we use it for the greater good? … It’s based in that visionary thinking that design and planning are fundamental to economic development, and you really can’t separate the two.”