The Downtown Moorhead project has secured nearly a half million dollars in funding to create a dedicated organization working toward making downtown Moorhead vital and vibrant again. The steering group consists of Moorhead leaders and is led by the three Moorhead college presidents: William Craft, Concordia; Anne Blackhurst, MSUM; and Peggy Kennedy, M State.
The steering group gained the support of 28 investors. The money will be used toward an executive director of the organization and some outside assistance as the group gathers input to determine what the community wants in a refreshed downtown.
“A couple of us got together and started doing ‘What if?’ sessions,” Dave Anderson, a member of the steering committee, said at the news conference announcing the new organization. “Out of that conversation, we began a process of taking it around to people and started dreaming.”
Scattered around the Rourke Art Museum where the news conference took place were images of Moorhead in its heyday. The storefronts were tightly packed and the streets were bustling. But in the 1970s, Anderson says, Moorhead did what many cities tried – a process of clear cutting their downtowns getting rid of the old buildings and putting up a shopping mall. Some 40 years later, that shift in focus isn’t working for the city and people have been longing for change. The initial committee was careful to not set too many parameters on what the next phase should bring, leaving that open-ended for residents to bring their ideas and the executive director to work with those ideas to determine the vision. They were clear about who this new downtown needed to serve though.
“One of the things college students hunger for is life in a full community,” Craft says. “We want to be a downtown for people pushing strollers and for people pushing walkers and everyone in between.”
Anderson reiterated that it needs to be a downtown for all ages. Asked how the colleges could integrate into the downtown, both Craft and Kennedy said the opportunities were exciting and they too wanted to hear from their students and campuses and determine what they desired.
“We need to be authentic and listen to those student voices,” Crafts says. “I want to see them active in this thinking and dreaming.”
The people of Moorhead will have the opportunity to be part of focus groups as well as participate in some online forums to give input on the next stage to bring back the downtown.
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