Category: Placemaking

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Brandon Burton 0:00
This is the Chamber Chat Podcast, the show dedicated to chamber professionals to spark ideas and to get actionable tips and strategies to better serve your members and community.

Hello, Chamber Champions. Welcome to Chamber Chat Podcast. I’m your hosts Brandon Burton. And it’s my goal here on the podcast to introduce you to people and ideas to better help you serve your Chamber members and your community.

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Our guest for this episode is Rudy Flores. Rudy is the President and CEO of the Lincoln Square Ravenswood Chamber of Commerce in Chicago, also known as the LSRCC. He is a passionate advocate for small business and community development. Over Rudy’s 13 year tenure, he’s grown the LSRCC budget by 354% and led the creation of a community wide master plan that has driven significant public investments. He also manages the Lincoln Square Neighborhood Improvement Program and has secured grants to enhance organizational resilience and foster peer to peer training. Rudy serves as a chair on the US Chamber in on the US chambers, Institute for organizational management, Board of Regents and the Illinois Association of Chamber of Commerce Executives, demonstrating his commitment to advancing the chamber industry. Rudy, I’m excited to have you with us today here on Chamber Chat Podcast. I’d love to give you a moment to say hello to all the Chamber Champions who are out there listening, and to share something interesting about yourself so we can all get to know you a little better. Yeah,

Rudy Flores 2:16
thanks for having me today. You know, I am in a different type of chamber, I think, than most of our industry, where it’s in the inner city Chicago is a little different than most, where every neighborhood within the city proper has a Chamber of Commerce. So I’m in a square mile area that has 45,000 residents. So that’s usually shocking to people. And the business mix. We have about 800 business licenses within that square mile. So that’s something I think that’s unique. And then about myself, that’s something I that people usually find really interesting, is I just bought a car in March of 2023 so two years ago, I went 22 years without having a vehicle. I’ve always lived in more dense urban settings, Baltimore, DC, Philadelphia and Chicago, so never really needed a car, and decided to finally get one and do some more exploring and being on the two boards that you mentioned, I’ve been traveling a lot more to different chambers through my role, and it’s been really interesting and unique to go and visit, you know, rural chambers, suburban chambers. And the one thing I like to tell people is, like, you know what? We’re all the same. We all have the same struggles, the successes. It’s just our geographies are different. So it’s been really fun for me having a car and getting to drive around and, they, know, experience the chamber industry.

Brandon Burton 3:42
Yeah, that is, it is interesting. So was it an adjustment to drive again? Like to skip behind the wheel?

Rudy Flores 3:50
Yeah, I still rent cars here and there, you know. I mean, you still have to have a car originally, but, you know, it’s, I’m don’t have the downtime of, like, reading a book while on transit and stuff like that. So that’s a little different or, you know, but now I’m switching to podcasts.

Brandon Burton 4:07
Good deal. I’m glad, glad we could support that for you. Well, tell us a little bit more about the Lincoln Square Ravenswood chamber. Just give us an idea. I mean, you, you’d mentioned the 45,000 population, that square mile. It definitely is unique. But give us an idea, size, staff, budget, scope of work. I mean, it is a unique type of chamber. So just to dive into that a little bit and help help us get our minds wrapped around that, I guess.

Rudy Flores 4:39
Yeah, so when I started in was that 2011 it was just at two and a half of us, you know, two full time, one part time. Now we’re at five full time, one part time. We have a little over 300 members. Why? What else our budget is? When I started was right around three. 100,000 the last two years we’ve been over a million. So, you know, growth has been a really important thing, like trying to diversify our income, it’s been a big focus. And that’s that you mentioned in my bio, a peer to peer grant where we train other chamber professionals. It’s been about, how do you grow your budget without, you know, overworking your employees, or, you know, only having limited employees and stuff like that. So that’s been a big focus on mine, just because I love the industry that we’re in. But you know, in my community, in Lincoln, COVID area of Chicago, we’re on the north side. We’re about a mile and a half from Wrigley Field, where the Cubs play. So the members that we have, a lot of them are brick and mortar retail restaurants. So I know a lot of chambers have, like the CVBS or the main street organizations, so we kind of more aligned with that, but doesn’t mean we don’t have the professional services and stuff like that. So for us, it’s always having to find a balance of like, our bread and butter is that brick and mortar retail restaurant. So we’re doing a lot of events where it’s consumer facing, but still having to figure out the right mix of things we’re doing to create benefits for those lawyers, accountants, you know, insurance agents, things like that.

Brandon Burton 6:14
Yeah. So with one square mile that you’re working with when it comes to events and different things like that, do you have a venue that you go to, like your go to venue that you use? Or how do you when you don’t have the entire city necessarily to to pull from, or maybe you do, I don’t know. I mean, how do you, how do you approach that when you have different events and where you need to utilize a venue of sorts, yeah.

Rudy Flores 6:41
So, I mean, the public street, it’s like, our biggest venue. So we, Chicago is really well known for street festivals. You know, if you’ve been to Chicago, hopefully you’ve been in the summer, when our weather is amazing. If you’ve been in the winter, it’s a different amazing. It’s cold and windy. You know, earlier this week, it was a negative three windshell, you know, at eight o’clock in the morning. So, so we really, we had two street festivals that we do in one’s in the second week of July, and then the other one is the first weekend of October. The one in the summer has about 40,000 attendees. It’s music, craft beer, local businesses and food. And where the one in October is called Apple fest. It’s a Fall Harvest Festival where we bring farms in from around the Midwest and kind of celebrate the return of fall. We hit 70,000 people this year. The we closed down almost a half a mile of our main business corridor. And it’s all about promoting local businesses. And so that’s where, like a big, big money generator for us, is that those are fundraising efforts for the for the organization, but also our members are selling product and stuff and making money. But then we do our smaller things, like in the winter we have, we’re lucky, an industrial corridor that, over the years, has turned into more like event spaces and more artists and startups and galleries and stuff like that. So we do rent some of those venues and do things indoors. We used to do galas. We don’t really do that anymore, because our membership isn’t really looking for that kind of stuff. So we do a lot more business to consumer facing events. We do things like wine strolls and beer crawls and stuff like that, where you basically go and taste like for our wine store, we go, we get wine distributors to be within each of our businesses. They can be from dental offices to a retail store, and you buy a ticket as a consumer and go and taste wine. But it’s marketing the business, because you’re not walking into something. So we do a whole bunch of different things. We also run 22 weeks of farmers markets twice a week. So we have 78 days of programmed community events that we put on throughout the year. Wow, that’ll

Brandon Burton 8:54
keep you busy. It does well. That definitely helps give some more context around, you know, setting the stage for our discussion today, and we’re going to focus most of our conversation around that community master plan, and specifically with the income generation that comes from this community master plan. And we’ll dive in deep on this as soon as we get back from this quick break.

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All right, Rudy, we are back, so let’s, let’s dive into this community master plan. Tell us what it’s about, kind of how the vision came to be implementation, and, of course, get to the money part of it. That’s what everybody wants to know.

Rudy Flores 12:47
Yeah. So we started in, let’s say, like around 2013 or 14, seeing a lot of interest in developers coming into the community, and we had one specific street the city came into and did a streetscape, meaning they came in and redid, all the sidewalks did decorative plantings, like the brick crosswalks and stuff like that. And the in that street that they redid had a lot of just parking lots or, like, old industrial buildings that weren’t really being utilized anymore and stuff like that. And all of a sudden, developers started coming in, buying these properties, started building and multi unit homes were ground floor, some commercial and upper floors being either condos or apartments. And I noticed, like the residents of the area, like complaining. You go to these public meetings and everybody’s super angry and and everyone seen, I’d go to these as the as the chamber director, and and listen. And one thing I noticed was that people kept feeling like they weren’t being heard, they weren’t part of the process, and saying there’s no plan. And I, coming from an urban planning background, I spent my bachelor’s and my master’s programs in community planning. I was like, we need to look at not just individual properties, the way they’re developing and having public meetings talking about it, but let’s look at our entire community holistically. Bring people together to weigh in on what’s the direction they want to see growth happen, or maybe not see growth, and also letting everybody have a say, because I feel like most people that go to the in person public meetings are typically the angry ones, exactly the NIMBYs. And there are NIMBYs. And if you don’t know what NIMBY is, it’s not in my backyard and NIMBYs, yes, in my backyard, yes. And so, and there needs to be a balance, right? You can’t make everybody happy. So there needs to be a give and take. And so we were like, what can the chamber do? Because. Is backing up a little bit. Our community, starting in 2000 started to see a decline in population, and it’s a fairly affluent community now. It was originally the German area of Chicago, and over time, it’s just it’s changed into just being a mix of different people. But what was happening was our public schools, our district was getting better, so we had families moving in, and they were taking, we call them flats. They’re homes that are like each level is a different apartment, basically, so two flat or three flat, and converting them to single family. So it wasn’t changing the look and feel of the community, but what was happening is we were losing the density. And what happens then is then the businesses have less customers, and so we’re like, we need denser housing. The Chamber doesn’t want to get involved in like, the residential area drama, that’s what I call it, but the arterials, which are our commercial corridors, that’s the chamber like, that’s like, you know, our our territory, doing air quotes here. And so we were like, how do we advocate for growth along those commercial corridors to have denser housing so younger people can move in, or maybe, you know, individuals or couples that don’t have children, that are probably going to go out more and spend more money and still keep the fabric of those residential areas the way they are. So we have, basically, in the chambers, the umbrella organization of a we have a business improvement district, a taxing district that focuses on like public way, esthetics, cleaning and greening, holiday decorations. Can do some marketing programming. We do street pull banners and things like that, things like Main Street organizations do, and I know some communities have business improvement districts, so we call them special service areas here in Chicago, so that has its own board called a commission. So both the board of the chamber and that board of that taxing district both agreed to kind of partner together to put some funds together to do this community plan. And one of our goals was like, we really want it to not just be about pretty pictures of like, this is what we want things to look like. Because I tend to think that when people create these, like, elaborate plans, that just they look beautiful and they sit on a bookshelf and don’t go anywhere. We wanted data. That was the biggest piece. We still had pretty pictures, but we really wanted to have the data of what the community wanted, and so what we did was a lot of surveys and public meetings and and built this interactive website because we wanted to meet the residents and and employee employees who come into the community and people just visit. We wanted everybody to have a say and be able to give their thoughts and opinions on the way that they felt most comfortable doing. And so with the website, the way we developed, it was almost like a Pinterest, if you’ve been on Pinterest before, where you could post ideas, pictures, comments, whatever, about what you would like to see, and then people could add to it, or they could actually rank it, and if you got more likes and stuff that posted to go higher up on that that page. So that’s one way of getting people’s thoughts and opinions. We also had a map where you could place things on a map, if you, if your brain works that way, where you like to see a map, you’re like, oh, this intersection is difficult to cross that or, Oh, this would be a great place for a park or whatnot. You could post things on a map, and then we would have digital surveys. People would fill those out, and then we would make sure that all these ways that we’re trying and then go, sorry, and then go back to, like, the public meetings. We also hosted public meetings so you could weigh in on that as well. What we did was, though, ensured that we were marketing this, not just through a newsletter, but also through different social media channels. We’ve, as an organization, currently have over 40,000 followers between Facebook and Instagram. We’ve always had a really strong marketing presence, and so we really utilized those tools, so newsletters and social media and some media as well. We we have a PR firm, so we do some to our like our local online paper, we do some TV, media and stuff like that to publicize what we’re doing. So trying to make sure that we were being thoughtful and looking and creating a plan on how to get the buy in. And so through the whole process, the three or four surveys we did, we’d have like, 2000 entries for each one, wow, and, and we always make sure we do it where it’s multiple choice, right? Because most people don’t want to write, you know, anything. But we’d also always put like the other or a comment box, and we would get. 1000s of comments. It was, it was incredible to see, because I’ve done surveys so many times, but people were so invested in the project that we just got all this really great data. And so it really, it was. It really created a really great plan. And then the reason it really took off after that was because our elected officials saw the engagement that we were getting, and they were like, Oh, wow, this is my constituents. Like, right? That are weighing in. And they’re like, All right, well, this is what we’re we’re seeing and hearing because of the chamber. What can we do to actually start implementing these pieces?

Brandon Burton 20:43
Yeah. And I can see that being replicated in chamber of any size, really. If you start developing a vision, start, you know, doing the surveys, getting the feedback. I like the idea of the Pinterest type website, the maps, the surveys, compiling all the data, but, but that’s a key factor right there, is having the the elected officials seeing, hey, something’s going on here, and I need to be involved. And let’s see if we can make some of this stuff happen. It’s a

Rudy Flores 21:13
it also, it also, though the community too was really exciting because, again, there’s those original meetings with those developers coming in and developing projects without really

Brandon Burton 21:22
having the feedback coming in. Like, do we want this or not? Right, exactly. So people

Rudy Flores 21:27
were like, Oh my gosh, I have an outlet that I can finally have a voice. And it started to make people understand the chamber more, start to sign up for our information, and we now became, like, a bigger leader in our community. And then our politicians were like, oh, I need to start working with the chamber board. That’s

Brandon Burton 21:50
right, that’s awesome. So how did this start gaining traction? Once the elected officials say, hey, we need to be involved more. Let’s see how we can make some of this stuff happen. How did, how did things actually develop in, you know, seeing the ball move forward. Yeah. So,

Rudy Flores 22:07
you know, our area is split with different council members and our state rep and our state senator and stuff like that. And so everybody obviously wants a piece of the pie, and they want their piece to be first, and so that was the tricky part. So what we did? So we adopted the plan in 2019 it took a little over a year to do the plan, and we decided to do the plans, a big, overarching plan, right? It’s not something that’s super detailed about any one thing. It comes, you know, just talking about all different pieces with some recommendations on what are the things you probably should start first? So what we did was those recommendations started to do like these bite sized studies each year afterwards, and balanced it between our two council members, because that’s who we work with the closest so we’re two we’re calling wards here in Chicago. So we have the 47th Ward and the 40th ward. And we did two different studies, one in 2020 in our 40th Ward and one in 2021 in our 47th ward. And that was a way for us to work with both offices so they both know they’re getting a piece of the pie and seeing how we can do a deeper study in these in two different projects. The first project was an underutilized block of a street that, over time, had been rerouted so it was just like an empty street of nothing. And we did this a temporary Plaza during the COVID years to see, would this space eventually be able to be turned into a park, like a city park, and it worked pretty well, and that, working with the council member, was able to secure, I think, like, $12 million not just for the plaza itself, but to redo the entire commercial corridor in the section of this area which was kind of a blighted part of our of our community. And then the following year, we did a deeper dive study around our transit station, which was is in the center of our central business district for our community, to re look at an under utilized Plaza and a parking lot that we use for our farmers market and some festivals occur there about how can we make the parking lot that look like a parking lot? So be for parking when it’s not being used for some activation, but then if it’s being used for the farmers market or festival, it doesn’t feel like you’re standing in a parking lot. So what’s going to happen is it’s going to be pavement converted into like brick pavers and stuff like that, and then the plaza that’s next to it that’s very under utilized is going to be incorporated into it. So it all feels like this, like nice little landscaped area. And so both of those studies happen year after year, much cheaper than the big project that we were doing originally, but came from that, um. And then that those two little projects, both of our council members took that information and then started to look for funding sources, through public dollars that could help implement them, so we would not have been able to fund the actual construction and the construction for the first projects occurring right now. Hopefully we’re wrapping up this spring, and the other one is starting this spring and will hopefully be finished within a year.

Brandon Burton 25:25
Okay, that’s awesome, but I like seeing that, the vision that gets caught, and then, you know, seeing that the ideas spread. So the idea of this being a so you get these, these big improvement projects right as part of the master plan, and there’s big expense that comes along with that. Like you said, you know, elected officials are going after the funding, looking for that, but we’ve also talked about this being income generating for the chamber. So how does that play into the overall master plan? Well,

Rudy Flores 26:02
there’s a couple, a couple of things. So the Some people ask, what does this have to do with a business organization? Right where in enhancing the public way? Well, the public way, you know, the prettier it is, the more likely consumers are going to come and support the businesses along that. And so the current businesses started. The ones that were part of members already knew what we’re trying to do. The ones that weren’t, oh, seeing that the chamber is really trying to invest in their area to ensure that they’re going to see growth of, you know, foot traffic and stuff like that. And then we also started to see, like, developers looking at now properties we have, I think, like 400 plus units now being built within this, this confined area because of the plan, because they know that all of this investment, public investments, coming. But we started having people like, message us, like businesses message us, and we’re like, Hey, I saw the work you’re doing. How do I get involved in this. Like, it just started to build a conversation, because we just became more noticeable. Like, it wasn’t just about the events that we do. If you’re not brick and mortar retail restaurant, you might not want to do some of our public facing events. It wasn’t about the networking. It was just this, this change that’s happening, I think, in the chamber world in the last couple of decades, where it’s not just about networking, because you can network in so many ways. It’s just another component to showing what a business organization is doing to try to create more business for businesses,

Brandon Burton 27:36
right? So it’s very organic. The revenue generating is organic, and these businesses seeing the value, wanting to be a part of the chamber, wanting to support, wanting to just be engaged more fully. So have you, I know construction, you’ve got two sides of the coin, right? It’s very positive. It’s exciting to see new growth, new development, and then you’ve got the headache of dealing with the reality of this road’s closed for some time, or I can’t go the way I normally would go, or access to my business might be altered a little bit. Yep. So are you hearing any of that feedback yet? Is, how do you how do you deal with that through I, I’m I’m in Texas, and we get we’ve got a lot of growth here and and we see that with construction, where, especially, you know, access to businesses, and it’s an opportunity where a chamber can step up and help provide some solutions, right? But what obstacles are you seeing coming up, and how do you go about helping to resolve those obstacles.

Rudy Flores 28:41
Yeah, so the research we had done before the construction started, we knew that usually, when there’s the construction happening on the street that you’re located on your your sales might dip by 25% you know, at minimum, sometimes. And yeah, because just getting to the business or finding parking or just being able to walk down the sidewalk becomes difficult. You know, we learned that the hard way, like having to communicate better, like more often trying to meet people where they need to find their the communication, like the one of the first projects I we could have done better, getting the word out about what’s what to anticipate, and so learning from the mistakes of like, maybe not. We didn’t walk door to door handing out flyers. Right now, we have the contractors on the construction team, like working with our local government, having them go and ensure that they’re handing out individual flyers. We’re already emailing and stuff like that, but we all know we get a bazillion emails, and if you’re a small business, you’re wearing so many hats, you’re going to miss a lot. So that was one thing. We also started to do weekly contract meetings. So the chamber attends it with the contractors, our government official offices, somebody also attends it, but it’s open to the public. So. So if a business has a concern about maybe, you know, they’re getting deliveries or stuff like that, they can join that call. Or if they have any grapes, you know, they can just make sure that the team that’s doing the construction and can hear it. The construction started to become phased instead of just doing a whole street at one time, like three blocks at a time, only on one side of the street, so you’re not just disrupting everybody and everything. Started to look at the way that logistics of each project were being done. So you know, we had to learn the hard way. But at the main takeaway is, there’s never too much communication, and I think it’s our role to ensure that we communicate the way that people want to receive the information. It’s not always about what’s easiest for us. It’s about how to get that message out there and then being able to show like I did a printed delivery, I did a email, I did a phone call, or whatever you can do, because then it really shows you care. And those little things, I think that’s what makes chambers really unique and special, and I think that’s what makes the businesses happier. And then they want to be a part of you and continue being a part of

Brandon Burton 31:15
you. Yeah, I think sometimes we’re afraid to try to reach out one more time or one other way, because we don’t want to over Burton, the recipient, right? The Chamber members, yes, and when it’s going to directly affect their business. I think if you feel that prompting, if you feel like maybe I need to call too, or I need to, you know, do a personal flyer, whatever it is, I’d say follow that gut instinct, yeah,

Rudy Flores 31:40
because it’s not us asking for money. Like, they probably, that’s what they’re not looking at your sales like, Hey, can you sponsor this or whatnot? This is like, hey, I want to ensure that you’re ready to anticipate any, you know, things that might put a pause and in your business, or, you know, in consumer spending,

Brandon Burton 31:56
yeah, well, it definitely seems like an exciting time you guys got a lot going on, great vision and and lots of opportunity. I like to ask for, for those listening, who are, you know, wanting to take their chamber up to the next level? What kind of tip or action item might you suggest to them and trying to accomplish that goal? So

Rudy Flores 32:19
the big thing for us is, was the the money that needed to be utilized right to do this project. And so, you know, having a reserve is extremely important. If you know you’re around around 2008 in the recession, hopefully your chamber started to make sure they were having a reserve after that issue, especially through 2020 Yeah, right, right. If you didn’t have a reserve, I know some chambers that you know, closed because of it. So we’re lucky that we, you know, have learned over the course of decades and had a large reserve, and so we had started to budget, to put money aside for this project. The way that we’re doing that is through our festivals, so communicating to the public that when you’re coming to our festival and donating money, because we asked for donations at our entrances, that money we’re saying is going towards these kind of projects. So being very transparent about where the money is going, I think the community then really, like, starts to notice and understand and they want to support you. So that’s been that was our biggest thing. So I just budgeting is extremely important, and really ensuring that you’re trying to raise money. I think that, from my perspective, a lot of chambers tend to be afraid to charge for what they’re doing. But we do great work, and we don’t work for free, and so we are a business at the end of the day, and so really looking at, how do you generate money, not only to grow but also to do bigger projects. And then if you can tell the story of why you’re increasing your fees or asking for donations because of what you the projects you want to do, I think that goes a long way.

Brandon Burton 33:58
So with those business and community improvements going on, and you incorporate that into these events, and saying that these the money, the funds that are donated here, help to support that. Are you seeing an increase of people participating with those donations? Has the needle moved with that, or as far as how that’s being communicated and then and reciprocated on the back end?

Rudy Flores 34:19
Great question from our local community, yes, but as we were becoming more well known, so like the event I mentioned that happens in the fall Apple fest, we went from 50,000 people in 2023 to 70,000 in 2024 we did not see an increase in our gate donations for that event, it stayed the same. So our thoughts are our community that’s been coming take care is hanging, yeah, but now we’re pulling from a much wider audience that’s not going to have the connection to our community. They’re coming for the event and not not for like I want to make sure that this community is strong. Yeah, and so we now need to relook at our messaging and stuff. And how do you communicate that when everyone’s trying just to walk into the event, how do you market like, why this event is more than just getting a slice of apple buyer or buying a bushel of apples?

Brandon Burton 35:14
That is really good feedback, though. It’s good information to know that it’s being supported locally. You know, the community locally understands and that messaging is getting to them. And I can see somebody coming from out of town like, Hey, I don’t live here. What do I care? Right? I just exactly so, yeah, now that is interesting. Well, I like asking everyone that I have on the show, as we look to the future of chambers, how do you see the future of chambers and their purpose going forward.

Rudy Flores 35:43
You know, I think that you it has to be very mission focused. The younger generation, we know is not joining our organizations like the older generation. And I think part of that is because, not because they don’t want to be a part of something, is that they want to do something that’s like ensuring It’s more meaningful to what their beliefs are. And so I really believe it’s us having to really stand behind what our organization stands for, communicating that and showing that value. So it isn’t about the events like it was. I just the events of getting together and meeting somebody. There’s so many ways of meeting other people. It has you have to have a purpose that people feel emotional about. And so I think that that is one of the things. And I think economic development, I think that, you know, government is pulled so thin, and we seem to expect government to do everything, and in this example we’re talking about today, we took the initiative to do the plan ourselves, because we knew that our local government didn’t have the capacity to do it like they’re doing projects in our downtown and not in our neighborhoods, which is fine, like our downtown needs it, but we wanted to ensure that we were in control of our own destiny and our own community. And I think that that’s a direction that a lot of chambers can go, and I don’t think they need to do it alone. You can partner with somebody, because these can get costly. So finding another nonprofit organization that has shared values that you can bring, you know, resources together to do these kind of things, or do little, you know, small little studies that grow into a bigger one. There’s, there’s so many different ways you can do

Brandon Burton 37:27
it. Yeah, I like that. Being mission focused and communicating with that mission is clearly so people understand that the cause, the purpose, like, what is it you’re getting behind? And it’s still, it drives me crazy to this day when somebody will ask me, What does the Chamber of Commerce do?

Rudy Flores 37:44
Same here? Well, where do

Brandon Burton 37:47
we start, and which chamber are you talking about, right? Well, Rudy, this is great. And I think there’s you know, things that can be scaled too for other communities to be able to look at what you guys are doing here, and creating that vision and that sense of community, and driving that forward as to what the community wants things to look like and to be able to take some initiative on that. I wanted to give you an opportunity to share any contact information for listeners who may want to reach out and learn more about your approach or how you guys are doing things there. What would be the best way for someone to reach out and connect with you? Yeah,

Rudy Flores 38:22
well, first you can go to our website. It’s LincolnSquare.org on the far right drop down menu as our SSA. That’s our taxing district that shows the master plan and everything we’ve spoken about today is broken down into pieces and actually the entire process of how we did it. So that’s there publicly available. My name is Rudy, r, u, d, y, you can email me at rudy@lincolnsquare.org. Happy to chat. This is I nerd out into this kind of stuff. So happy to talk about it, or just contact us at the contact box on our on our website, and that’ll get to me.

Brandon Burton 38:58
That’s perfect. Well, we’ll get that in our show notes for this episode too, and make it easy to find you. But Rudy, I appreciate you taking time to be with us today on Chamber Chat Podcast and sharing some of these successes and vision that you guys have, and the really how you guys are moving the needle and seeing the the improvement of your community. It’s it’s fantastic.

So thank you so much. Yeah, thanks for having me.

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