The Champion of Local Champions: Recast City’s Ilana Preuss

Danny Caine 
Before I got to ILSR, I worked for a decade as a bookseller at an independent bookstore, both as a part-time frontline worker and as an owner. Bookselling is not an easy world for many reasons. Chief among them is one trend I saw over and over again. Talented and ambitious booksellers could not access initial financing to open new bookstores. A choice few could ever access the kind of healthy bank loan that eases the path towards building out a new space and filling it with books.

Countless others had to scramble, adapt, and look to alternatives. Some made it happen with crowdfunding. Others, I fear, just couldn’t swing it. The people most impacted by this problem are women and people of color. It was even baked into the history of my bookstore. When the two women who founded The Raven Book Store, Mary Lou Wright and Pat Kehde initially sought a bank loan, they were told that a bookstore was a high-risk hobby and not worthy of financing.

To open the store, they had to resort to a combination of a second mortgage and a prehistoric version of crowdfunding, just gathering money from friends and family willing to help. Today’s guest on Building Local Power, Ilana Preuss is working to combat the funding gap for small businesses. She’s also working to stimulate local economies by encouraging small-scale manufacturing. She’s also working to spotlight and highlight stories of women who build local power by fostering connections among entrepreneurs.

She does this all through her company, Recast City, Which is named after her 2021 book, Recast Your City, How to Save Your Downtown with Small Scale Manufacturing. Ilana Preuss as you can tell, works tirelessly through a variety of initiatives to build strong local economies and encourage vibrancy in American downtowns. Of course, she’s a perfect guest for this show.

We’ve even had her on once before to talk about that work with small scale manufacturing. But given her recent work and the times we find ourselves in, I wanted to have her back to update us on what she’s up to and to share her expertise on how to spark small business growth in our current political climate. I hope you enjoy our conversation as much as I did.

Ilana Preuss, welcome back to Building Local Power. We’re so glad to have you.

I’ve done a bunch of reading about you and your work, I think one way I would describe you as a champion of local champions.

ILANA PREUSS 

That’s a good one.

Danny Caine 

Yeah, I actually have to credit my boss, Reggie for that one, but I totally agree. He’s right on. How did you come to this work? Like, how did you get interested in it? What’s your origin story for your work with local leaders and city planning?

ILANA PREUSS 

When we call it my origin, sorry, I get to feel like a superhero. I came at all of this from loving places at the most basic way. grew up wandering places, wandering downtowns, and I always appreciated in some intrinsic way a place that felt loved. It didn’t matter if it was a big city or a small town. that manifested itself in really seeing the great in every place. And when I was thinking about what to study, I thought about, oh, architecture, right? I’m going to physically design this great place. And

Well, at the time, architecture students never got to sleep and I really liked my sleep. So I found this great tangent to architecture, which was city planning, where you could think about the design of a place, but also the governance and the policy and all of the pieces that shape how a place comes together and the people’s health and the environment. And all of those factors come me in city planning. And so I studied city planning and I worked in housing choices and transportation choices and the…the small P politics of how do you get things to happen in a community specifically focused on downtowns. And over the years, I realized that we can talk about these great downtowns. We can talk about, zoning. We can talk about policies for transportation, but we never talked about the small businesses. We never had a conversation about, well, what kind of business should be in that kind of storefront that makes this place reflect the culture of the community, reflect the energy and the uniqueness of the community and brings that economic resilience and stability that we places need. And why are some places not getting that? And why are some places sort of deemed not worthy of that investment? And some places, the businesses are deemed not worthy of that investment. So I went down this great rabbit hole trying to understand all of that. And I came out the other side being…completely obsessed with what I call small-scale manufacturing businesses and the impact that they have on downtowns and neighborhoods, big cities, small towns and everything in between.

Danny Caine
We’ll get to small scale manufacturing much more later on. In addition to the previous episode of Building Local Power that you recorded a couple years ago, we’ll link to that in the show notes. I have to wonder, you mentioned these great places where you felt loved growing up. Do you want to shout out one or two of those specific places?

ILANA PREUSS 

I actually, ⁓ most of my life grew up in the suburbs, but I remember visiting my father’s family in New York City and how you just sort of randomly cross the street and see some small shop and being able to pop into a place and buy a bread or a bagel and just the energy of that or going to a small town in Colorado and just getting to see the energy of that main street in that town. ⁓

And that just made a really big impression on me.

Danny Caine 

I also am a product of the suburbs, but I had the same kind of awakening when I moved to Lawrence, Kansas, which is this great kind of walkable college town with a really active main street. get into your work. I think a really great way for our listeners to learn more about what you actually do is to talk about some success stories. December, you announced the inaugural Spark 10, which recognize leaders for quote, their roles in sparking catalytic change in their communities.

⁓ One thing I noticed and you talk about is that they’re all women, which you explained by saying women are often the source and instigators of economic growth, but their stories are rarely the ones told so widely. So why don’t we correct that a little bit and tell the stories of some of these inspiring women. Who are some of the folks that are in the Spark

ILANA PREUSS 

So we selected a group of women who are really the edge of what we see for local success, all connected back to small scale manufacturing ultimately, but all doing it in their own unique way. So we have people creating space for small business success, Anna Urzua in Santa Ana, who is running a cooperative incubator.

She has a program to incubate cooperatives in her predominantly Mexican and Mexican immigrant community, building off of what she knows from the communities in Mexico and creating more economic stability for her community. She also helped participate in a group of people that helped launch a neighborhood, a community land trust to be able to control some of the fate of property in their community.

Kiomi Rollins. She’s in Atlanta and she has created really a mutual aid space in her neighborhood in Atlanta that has the coffee shop, but also has the tables where people can come together in the community but where they also teach business development classes, where they also do celebrations, where they also have won a grant to give out micro grants to small businesses within the community as well.

And then there’s folks like Jen Fagel, ⁓ who created a commercial shared kitchen in Boston that is not just a traditional commercial kitchen where people can come in and pay for a few hours of space a month to grow their business, but also has started doing contract manufacturing to break into the regional distributors because that’s been the biggest barrier is getting the small producers into the distributors. And by doing some manufacturing, they’re opening up the door for other folks in the community.

Danny Caine

Those sound like really amazing stories. wonder how did you come across these folks in order to highlight them?

ILANA PREUSS

It was really just a phenomenal opportunity. We announced it. We announced it to our list. We announced it to our social media. And the thing that was really the most exciting to me is that I knew very few people who were nominated on the list. It was really our broadest network saying, ⁓ people are worthy of recognition and they actively stepped in and nominated somebody from their community. Every once in a while, there was somebody I knew who did the nomination, but it was very rare. One of the really exciting ones was somebody I’ve known since I was 13 years old. He nominated somebody, he lives in Pittsburgh and nominated somebody in the Pittsburgh community, Nisha Blackwell, who is a business owner. She owns a small scale manufacturing business, creating bow ties and women’s fancy bows called lavaliers.

Just this amazing small community that you can get wrapped around a place once you start seeing those connections.

Danny Caine

I’m glad you bring up connections because I think a lot of the examples, strikes me that these are people connecting other people. They’re kind of like bridge spaces, whether it’s connecting folks to an industrial kitchen, connecting folks to each other for mutual aid. think one of the reasons why I was interested in this project is because it sounds like people are building local power. That’s exactly what they’re doing. That’s the concept of our show. Can you talk about what you see as the role of this kind of connection in the act of building local power?

ILANA PREUSS

Absolutely. I think at the most basic level, when you see it happening somewhere else, you see that it’s possible in your community too. And so the more that we are telling the success stories and telling the stories of the heroes who are making these successes happen, I think the more that you can look at that and say, ⁓ I can do that too. That makes a lot of sense. Or even better, you pick up the phone or you pick up the email and you send that person a message and say, hey, I love what you’re doing. Can I learn from you?

So a lot of what we also do in our work is make the connections between the practitioners in different communities who are interested in small scale manufacturing and creating those strong connections and connecting them up with the people who have done that work before. So they can say, you’ve done 80 % of the work because you have a model that works. I just need to customize 20 % of it. And that is going to jump us to implementation in any community so much faster.

Danny Caine

And I think your work in compiling and promoting the Spark 10 is doing exactly that. It’s bringing attention and awareness to these folks that are doing the amazing work, perhaps in hopes that it would spread. of, we’ll have information in the show notes about the whole list of these great folks.

Another aspect of your work is working on the racial funding gap for small businesses, which is I think is really important. I come from the bookstore world. I wrote a book called How to Protect Bookstores and Why, which profiles 13 different bookstores across the United States and in Canada. And one of the things I kept coming across is these folks found it really hard to find startup capital to open a business, especially women, especially people of color. And this is something you have worked on, in fact, with ILSR.

So you teamed up with ILSR in the past couple of years for a program called Equitable Lending Leaders. Can you tell our listeners about that program and what you and ILSR learned about how to get more small business funding to entrepreneurs who traditionally haven’t been able to access it?

ILANA PREUSS 

Our focus is really on access to capital. And that’s what it all comes down to, exactly what you were describing. How do we improve access to capital across the board with a focus on people who haven’t had that access in the past? And so that might be a geographic challenge, right? A lot of rural communities have never had access or they’ve lost their access to local banking. And so they can’t access now.

There are a lot of different populations within our bigger cities that have a history of broken trust with the financial institutions or have never had access to it. And the question we asked was, how do we help some existing systems improve the way they do it, they are providing that access to capital. And so this program was specifically through the U.S. Economic Development Administration’s Revolving Loan Program and working with the RLF grant recipients, that’s what they’re called, who give out the loans within their regions to learn how to improve their outreach and their underwriting to help reach more people.

Danny Caine

Again, working in those connections, being the bridge between the folks who need the capital and the programs that might provide it. Thinking about those programs, it sounds like the EDA’s revolving loan fund is important for this work of helping to connect entrepreneurs to funding outside of the kind traditional private banking apparatus. it certainly

that work on closing these gaps, whether it be racial gaps or geographic gaps, seem to be at risk of losing their funding these days. we hear stories about it every day. So what would be lost if this federal funding for entrepreneurs unable to access traditional bank funding were to dry up or be eliminated?

ILANA PREUSS 

There’s a huge gap in the way our banks work and the needs of the entrepreneurs in our community. The biggest challenge is when they are in a geography ⁓ demographic bracket or a business type that the bank decision makers are not familiar with, it’s automatically deemed high risk. so programs like the EDA, Revolving Loan Fund program, the CDFI program, which is out of treasury that is threatened. If those go away, there is going to be an enormous drop in entrepreneurship in the country because there will not be these programs that are intended to fill the gap, this acknowledged gap between the needs of lot of entrepreneurs and what the private sector banking community is willing to do.

I would guess we see an enormous drop in entrepreneurship and small business starts if those programs are removed.

Danny Caine 

I think another question I have about the kind of current political climate, you’re a longtime advocate for small scale domestic manufacturing. Anytime I hear domestic manufacturing, I think tariffs A, they’re top of mind for basically everybody, B, ostensibly the role of a tariff is to encourage domestic manufacturing. So from your stance as an advocate for small-scale domestic manufacturing, are these high tariffs the way to encourage it?

ILANA PREUSS 

I think the question that I would is the tariffs are going to be there no matter what, what are we doing about it? Because…

Historically, there were points where we had high tariffs, but at those points we had major domestic investment in industry and we’re not getting that piece. one of the challenges, I just wrote an article in Governing Magazine about this. One of the challenges is that large scale manufacturing takes many years to move and build and get off the ground. And we are very likely within a month to have sort of a dire situation in terms of production and distribution because of the tariffs. So I believe that state governments need to step in and really invest in small manufacturing, really focusing on businesses with than 50 employees, and in many cases, fewer than 20 employees who have capacity to create products domestically. These businesses pivoted overnight during the pandemic to produce the emergency protective gear that we needed. And I believe now is the time for us to turn to them again in this moment where we are about to be in an emergency situation with products to in fact invest in them and help them retain and expand their capacity for production to respond to the needs that we will

Danny Caine 

So in your eyes, fact that large scale manufacturing takes so long to get set up and ramp, it might take three years to build a major Panasonic chip plant, but a small scale manufacturer with less than 50 employees, you think their kind of flexibility and small size makes them able to respond quicker?

ILANA PREUSS 

Yes, they’re more nimble, they can customize faster, and they can be responsive overnight.

Danny Caine

at Recast City, one of the tools that you’ve come up with to kind of evaluate places, engagement with, or potential for the small scale manufacturing is called the Spark Scorecard, which you dropped very recently. In fact, I got an email about it and that’s what kind of sparked my interest in doing this show with you. So tell us about the Spark Scorecard. Who’s it for? How did it come to be? And what does it do?

ILANA PREUSS 

So the Spark Scorecard is a tool for any community to step in in 10 minutes and get an understanding of what’s working well in their support for their small scale manufacturers in their community. ⁓ What kind of assets do they have in their entire community, their ecosystem, right, their entrepreneurial ecosystem within the area in terms of…

space for these businesses, training to grow these businesses, capital, like we were talking about for these businesses, and then telling their story, PR, so it can be replicated. And the scorecard is 30 questions for every community to answer, and they get a score to see how they’re doing, and they get to select a set of recommendations based on their answers of what

might be the next three things to work on within their community to strengthen the ecosystem of support for their small scale manufacturers. The thing that people need to note in the world of the score is the score is only based on support for small scale manufacturers. So some people end up with a 10. It just means that you’re just starting your support for small scale manufacturing. It’s not that your economy is in a bad place. It’s specific to this sector.

Danny Caine 

And when you envision the person who is answering these 30 questions, is it a city councilman? Is it an average resident? Is it a mayor?

ILANA PREUSS 

It’s going to be somebody who has knowledge about the local economic programs within the community. So we’re often seeing people in the economic development department answer it, a mayor’s office or a city council office. It might be Main Street or downtown authority who’s leading it as well, or a small business development center. Somebody who has a sense of that broader scope, the chamber is often looking at it as well.

You know, it’s also an interesting experiment to give it to a number of people, ask a number of people in the community to do it, to see how people perceive what’s out there. Because a lot of the challenge in our community is that people don’t know what, in fact, what programs and what tools are out there. And so if you end up with this very wide variety of answers, you know that communications is in fact one of your barriers.

Danny Caine

So it’s not just the number score, but it’s kind of the range of potential scores if many people take the quiz. one thing that’s really interesting about this to me is it basically turns it into data. You have a number to point at when you’re negotiating the halls of power in order up more support for small-scale manufacturing. OK, so I think that brings me to my last question.

say I am an average building local power listener. I’m interested in community development through small scale manufacturing. I’m fired up. These nimble businesses that can pivot and create these great products locally and build my local economy. What should I do? What are the steps I should take to help encourage this development in my community?

ILANA PREUSS

I’d say there’s three things to start with. One is shop at your local businesses. Anything that’s locally owned, whenever you can choose to spend your money with them, those dollars stay in your community a thousand times and just recirculate. So that’s number one. Number two, tell your elected officials that those businesses are important to you. Call your elected official, write to your elected official and say, these businesses are important to me. What are you doing to support them?

And three, I would think about if you want to have a product business yourself, right? An artisan, maybe you sell an Etsy, maybe you sell to friends, maybe you sell at the local farmer’s market. There’s a lot more of these in our community than we know of. Bring your fellow business owners together. Just like you were talking about connections before, we know that when business owners have strong connections to people within their sector, they’re twice as likely to succeed. And when they have access to mentors within their sector,

they’re also twice as likely to succeed. So the more that our small scale manufacturers can get organized into their own communities with or without city support, the stronger they’re going to be as well.

Danny Caine 

Ilana Preuss thank you so much for checking back in with Building Local Power. I really enjoyed our conversation.

ILANA PREUSS
 
Thank you so much for having me today.

Danny Caine

As you can tell from our conversation, Ilana does so much to build local power By championing local champions. I’d love for you to get to know her work better and get connected with Recast City to follow their work more closely. This week’s show notes are a bounty of great info and resources. For starters, you’ll find a link to Ilana’s previous appearance on Building Local Power.

Additionally, you’ll find links to some of Alana’s writing in governing magazine, as well as a link to buy her book from indie-friendly bookshop.org, of course, but you can also always order it from your local indie bookstore. You can also find information about the entire list of Spark 10 awardees to read about their powerful stories.

Here at Building Local Power, we’d love to invite you, our listeners, into the conversation. If you have thoughts about this or other episodes, ideas for future guests, or if you just want to get in touch, Send me a note at [email protected]. And as always, if you like what you hear, please like, subscribe, review, and share with your friends.

This episode of Building Local Power was produced by me, Danny Caine with the help of Reggie Rucker. I did the editing with help from Téa Noelle, who also composed the music. Thank you so much for listening and see you in two weeks.

• The Spark 10
• Ilana Preuss’s previous appearance on Building Local Power
• Governing Magazine: “Our Priority Should Be Small Scale Manufacturing“
• Governing Magazine: “Empty Storefronts? Let Entrepreneurs Make Things There“
• Governing Magazine: “Local Governments’ Vital Role in Getting Small Businesses the Funding They Need“
• Ilana Preuss’s book Recast Your City: How to Save Your Downtown with Small-Scale Manufacturing

https://bookshop.org/p/books/recast-your-city-how-to-save-your-downtown-with-small-scale-manufacturing-ilana-preuss/15672748?ean=9781642831924