Episode 6: Diane Laird and the Downtown Dover Partnership
focuses on what downtowns can do to become healthier, more welcoming, and more robust. And for the past year and a half, she’s been the Executive Director of the Downtown Dover Partnership. It’s an important program that works to make downtown Dover a great place to be. Diane is our guest on this week’s podcast.
Diane makes clear that success in her work needs to involve anybody and everybody. “Our partners are anybody that I could lay eyes on truly because I really consider anybody that has an investment of any kind in the Downtown to be a potential partner, because they’re part of the future. They should be part of the planning for the future.”
And she is clear that the small size of Delaware makes it possible to do much more than elsewhere. “When I would travel to National Conference and talk with my fellow coordinators and the Texas coordinator would have to take planes to visit her city, her cities and towns in Texas and I can drive top to bottom and side to side. I guess there’s something about the close connections and the quickness of getting things done. I mean, there are certainly challenges as everywhere, but there is an opportunity to do things a little more quickly and maybe even get recognized, towns or people getting recognized on a statewide level that you wouldn’t necessarily have in Texas.”