Amid the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and early 2021, leadership at Downtown Lansing Inc. began discussing ways to reverse the negative impacts of business closures and decreased commerce on the local economy. The effort yielded Middle Village, a retail accelerator program emphasizing women- and minority-owned businesses.
“We were trying to build a program that would not only help us fill the vacancies in the short term but also create a feeder system so that we would never find ourselves in that spot again,” Julie Reinhardt, DLI’s director of downtown community development, said. “We thought the best way to do it was to create an accelerator program that would help businesses that were already going to open stores by lowering the barriers to entry and giving them business education opportunities.”
Sponsored by Lake Trust Credit Union, the Middle Village program has selected a cohort of six small businesses to participate each year since 2021. However, with Middle Village’s move last month from its original location at 112 S. Washington Square to a 2,000-square-foot space on the first floor of the historic Atrium Building, this year’s cohort was kept to five businesses.