So much is going on in Florida’s Capital City it’s hard to keep up. The Greater Tallahassee Chamber of Commerce got an overview of some of the more significant happenings during Tuesday morning’s (5/10/16) breakfast meeting.
The scene was the F-S-U Turnbull Center. Chamber Chair Kathy Bell introduced a quartet of special presenters. One of them, Tallahassee Community College’s Kimberly Moore, said the school is on the fast track to open a retail entrepreneur training program in the former Mary Brogan Museum property, which the school now owns.
“(We’re) partnering with the Downtown Improvement Authority and even the Florida Retail trade to create an incubator program,” Moore said. “It is six months in length. Students who earn that certificate can compete for a spot where they get expert advice in key areas (such as) market, legal, communications, knowing your customer and it runs the gamut.”
Of course, any retail training course needs a practicum in providing good customer service, right? So Moore said TCC plans to open its own Starbucks franchise on site to give the students real-world interaction with actual customers.
“We are saying definitely in the year 2016 because that’s the year we’re celebrating our 50th, so end of the year, keep your fingers crossed!” she predicted.
Chamber members also heard from Matt Thompson, the co-owner of Madison Social. He and other bar operators in the Collegetown/Railroad Square/All Saints area are joining together to provide a unified “Brew District” experience with an appeal beyond the student population.
“We don’t want to own college bars,” Thompson insisted. “There are plenty of those experiences for students and that’s fine. What we want to do is be able to have a clearing house for Tallahassee; bring people from the northeast, the east, the west side of Tallahassee, the south down to our area and then have students be able to mingle with those people and hopefully be opened up to new experiences to go outside of the area of campus.”
At the same time, Thompson said the partners were producing a steady-stream of special fun events to lure young professionals and other non-students to the area on a regular basis.
“We actually created at Madison Social something called the ‘Tallahassee Bucket List’ recently, in which we came up with 14 items that you need to do in Tallahassee,” he said. “And we thought we’d have 50 people come out. We had 1,200 people come out and stand in a line for 3 hours!”
But speaking of college, what about all that world-class research that Florida State and FAMU are always bragging that they do? FSU’s Larry Lynch said there is now a pin-point focused effort to hook up individual companies with specific lines of research being done by the schools.
“I talked about MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging) and battery technology as some of the things we’re looking at,” Lynch explained. “And who in the world – industry wide - would be interested in what we’re doing and what problem we can solve for them that they can’t solve anyplace else.”
And, once some firms are figuratively “on the hook” Lynch said, the idea is to invite them to set up a modest presence in Tallahassee so they can keep a close eye on how that research is benefiting them.
“Those kind of companies have satellite offices in places of research and we want Tallahassee to be one of those places they look to put some of those satellite offices based upon the people and the investments we’ve made and just the opportunity to solve those problems.”
Leon County Commissioner John Dailey, this time in his day-job guise as a public policy consultant, talked about a project he’s been doing with the Florida League of Cities in which panels of dynamic young people research and suggest new avenues for municipal government action. And then there was Knight Creative Communities Institute Executive Director Betsy Couch. She had an update on the resurrection of the old Tallahassee Waterworks Facility on Gaines Street.
“What KCCI is looking to do is three-fold,” she said. “One was to raise awareness of the Waterworks building and why it’s important to our community. Two was to protect the asset so we can preserve the historical properties of it and three to help get it revitalized so it becomes this cool place of connectivity and helps to grow the downtown area near Cascades Park.”
What will the old Waterworks eventually become? Couch said stay tuned.
