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If you’re looking to get inspired by powerful thought leaders and peer experts—and feel the energy that only happens when Main Streeters gather to explore big ideas—then you have to check out the 2025 Main Street Now Conference’s Main Idea featured speakers! This year, in addition to perennial Main Street Approach topics, we’re proud to present two engaging, interactive, and connection-focused Main Idea sessions centered around a core theme: A Healthy Main Street Movement. We’re featuring industry experts and local practitioners whose conversations will explore ways that we can foster healthy communities and create a sustainable movement where everyone can fully participate and thrive.
Meet our Main Idea featured speakers and make sure to hear what they have to say at Main Street Now 2025!
If you want to see the true health of a Main Street, you have to look beyond the economic, cultural, and built environment. You have to look at the people. Are they coming from every part of the community? Are they engaging with each other, enjoying public spaces, and caring for others? We’ll explore how to foster healthy downtowns and commercial corridors by weaving trust and connection in our communities, even when it feels like America’s social fabric is at risk of unraveling. Join us for this interactive, connection-focused Main Idea session with:
Dawn Arrington, Founder at Comics at the Corner
Dawn Arrington founded and runs Comics at the Corner, a literacy organization that uses comic books to promote reading in traditionally underinvested communities, like the ones where she grew up and now lives. The group runs pop-up gathering spots called “Literacy Lounges” to promote connection. She has been a member of Cleveland’s Neighbor Up network since its inception and started a food and amenities exchange where neighbors gather on her porch to share items. Dawn holds an MA in English and Creative Writing, and an MBA.
Asiaha Butler, Co-Founder & CEO at Resident Association of Greater Englewood
Asiaha Butler was going to leave the Englewood neighborhood of Chicago where she and her husband grew up. She wanted a safer place to raise her family. One day, she was looking out her window and saw a small girl in a dress playing in the broken glass of a vacant lot. She decided she couldn’t be one more person to give up on those children and the community. Asiaha began working with neighbors and convinced the city to sell the vacant lots all over Englewood for a dollar. Over time, they turned the lots into gardens and gathering places. She founded and leads the Resident Association of Greater Englewood (R.A.G.E), which mobilizes people and resources to uplift, restore and heal the community.
Frederick Riley, Executive Director at Weave: The Social Fabric Project at The Aspen Institute
Frederick J. Riley’s hometown was once voted one of the most miserable places to live in the U.S. His childhood memories include food insecurity, evictions, and poverty. Yet there were always people at home, school, church, and in the neighborhood who showed him strength and love. His life was woven together by those people and, for him, is a testament to the power of community. He spent much of his career lifting up young adults through community programs at YMCAs around the country. Now he leads The Aspen Institute’s Weave: The Social Fabric Project, which connects and supports the people building trust within their communities and weaving a strong, inclusive social fabric.
Jackie Wolven, Executive Director at Main Street Eureka Springs
For 17 years, Jackie has helped strengthen the downtowns in rural America both economically and socially. She works to foster stronger connections and relationships within communities, building resilience and a sense of belonging. She’s grounded her work fully on "loving where you live" and using community spaces and culture to support individual mental health. Building better places goes hand in hand with creating emotional well-being and supporting a thriving and fulfilling economy.
Discover how creativity, storytelling, and connection can transform community engagement with James Rojas and John Kamp. In this interactive session, James and John will share their transformative process and stories of their work with Main Street communities, showcasing how playful, tactile approaches inspire meaningful connections and unlock shared visions. Join us for an unforgettable experience and a chance to connect directly with the authors:
James Rojas, Founder at Place It!
James Rojas is an urban planner, community activist, educator, and artist who runs the planning, model-building, and community-outreach practice Place It!. Through Place It!, he has developed an interdisciplinary, community-healing, visioning, and outreach process that uses storytelling, objects, art production, and play to help improve the urban-planning outreach process. James is an international expert in public engagement and has traveled around the United States, Mexico, Canada, Europe, and South America, facilitating over 500 workshops, and building over 100 interactive models. His research has appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Dwell, Places, and in numerous books.
John Kamp, Urban Designer at Prairieform
John Kamp is an urban and landscape designer, licensed landscape contractor (C-27 #307917), and facilitator, who runs the landscape, design, and engagement practice Prairieform. He has developed innovative tools to engage people of all ages and backgrounds in urban and landscape design, transportation, walkability, climate change, and water conservation. His landscape work centers on the creation of what he calls climatescapes, landscapes that do not require irrigation and that are anchored within the climates they are situation and a response to climate change.
John and James are co-authors of “Dream Play Build: Hands-on community Engagement for Enduring Spaces and Places,” a book offering a look at how people of all ages and backgrounds can incorporate tactile and participatory methods into their own efforts to effect change in their neighborhoods and cities.
Main Idea Tuesday: From left to right: Dawn Arrington, Asiaha Butler, Frederick Riley, Jackie Wolven.
Main Idea Wednesday: From left to right: John Kamp, James Rojas.