While farmers and gardeners are looking forward to the planting season, Main Street Vineland is already in the planning season—and we’re hard at work.

With the weather being too cold and unpredictable during the first two or three months of the year, we’re taking the time to roll up our sleeves and plan our events and initiatives for the rest of the year—after the weather breaks.

We’re having the quarterly meetings of our four teams—Organization, Design, Promotions, and Economic Vitality—this month at 12 p.m. each Thursday via Zoom. These meetings are an opportunity for us to plan the calendar of events for the year, review fundraising, volunteer, and design initiatives, and come up with economic initiatives and programs for our businesses on The Ave. In future columns, we’ll give more details about our plans.

While we’ll be planning a full schedule of events, the COVID situation is still with us—though recent developments give us reason to be optimistic. The present situation, however, has made us make adjustments to our usual lineup of events to stay within the parameters of safety.

Having said that, we’re moving ahead with some events in the meantime. We have been fortunate indeed to be able, despite these hard times, to celebrate the opening of quite a few new businesses. The ribbon-cutting ceremonies we have amid the depressing economic news offer a healthy dose of hope. We are planning another ribbon-cutting event for February to call attention to several more new businesses that are opening. Again, watch for more information. I must say again that this is testimony to the resiliency of our downtown in these challenging times—something of which I’m so very proud.

We’ll continue to help our businesses by giving them information about grant opportunities and other ways for them to survive during these times. We’re also looking to repeat some of the promotions that we’ve had—to publicize the businesses and bring customers in their doors. This will also include our newsletter and columns like this one.

“Our ‘Work on The Ave’ initiative is also designed to help our downtown by bringing new businesses to The Ave and have them think of our downtown as their alternative workspace. All that is going on right now.

So, just because winter is a time of hibernation for some, it’s the time when we’re just warming up.

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Remember that Main Street Vineland is here to help. In the spirit of social distancing and respecting the safety of our staff, our office is currently closed to walk-in public though we are still working every day. We pass this information along to our businesses every Tuesday, in the 9 a.m. hour, on SNJ Today 99.9 POP FM, Channel 22, and on Facebook Live on facebook.com/snjtodayradio.

For more on Main Street Vineland, call our office at 856-794-8653, visit TheAve.biz—or check us out on Facebook. You can also e-mail me at [email protected].