Plaza Midwood Collaborative Problem Solving Forum

This platform (made possible by a generous grant from the City of Charlotte) gives you the opportunity to provide your insight and ideas on a range of challenges:

• Festivals and Events
• Marketing
• Access and Mobility
• Placemaking
• Public Safety
• Shared Resources
• Social Districts
• Wellbeing

Plus, rather than being organized around specific challenges, the platform has some geographic hubs for small business owners in those hubs to tackle challenges specific to those areas. These include:

• Belmont
• East Central
• Eastway Crossing
• Lamar
• Upper Plaza

How It Works
Divided into 3 phases over a 6-week period, this process allows you to participate when you are able and to the depth that you are interested. You can participate in as many or as few challenge areas as you’d like. We encourage you to explore any that interest you before deciding if you’re interested in going further.

Phase 1: Define the Challenge (2 weeks)
During this phase you and your peers in the small business community will develop a consensus on the scope of the challenge, identity how the challenge is affecting your business and others, identify obstacles in the way of addressing the challenge, and determine the urgency of addressing the challenge.

Phase 2: Learn/Explore Best Practices (2 weeks)
With the challenges better defined, the platform will provide links to videos, podcasts, articles that focus on how other places in the world have tackled similar challenges. It’ll be a chance for everyone participating to find inspiration in what others have done successfully.

Phase 3: Potential Solutions (2 weeks)
Whether inspired by others or from ideas you come up with on your own, you and your peers working on the same challenge will propose solutions in this phase. Collaboratively, you can modify and improve ideas as they’re presented. You can vote on the solutions that you think will be the most effective.

By participating and using this platform, you and your peers will come up with a number of solutions. Many of them can use the grant money to implement soon after we complete this collaborative problem solving process!

It’s an exciting time and a challenging time for small businesses. Successfully improving the environment for small businesses and addressing these big challenges requires collaboration. Collaboration requires participation. Participation requires you!