Mary is considered the founder of the national Main Street network. Her work reaches far beyond Main Street.
For more than 30 years, Mary’s small but mighty firm provided strategic planning services to public interest clients—communities, state agencies, universities, and not-for-profit organizations—helping them build bridges between plans and people. Most of these assignments enabled clients to overcome inertia and create the momentum needed for change. Mary Means & Associates (MMA) earned a reputation for blending strategic thinking, effective community engagement, and market-based reasoning to create visionary plans that motivated action and increased clients’ capacity.
Harnessing Heritage and Place
MMA plans tapped the power of historic sites, natural features, and storytelling as economic assets by enlisting regional and local leaders in planning and implementing imaginative heritage corridors and heritage tourism initiatives. Firm accomplishments include preparing the first management plan for a national heritage corridor—the Blackstone River National Heritage Corridor—followed by numerous other national heritage areas and corridors, state heritage areas, scenic byways, and tourism destinations.
MMA brought this sensibility to its visionary work with numerous downtowns and urban neighborhoods in communities ranging from small towns to major cities like Wichita and New Orleans, often helping business, community, and government interests find common ground and work together. A hallmark of MMA’s work has been approaching strategic planning with a behavioral sensibility so that the ways visitors and residents relate to the built environment can be leveraged to achieve desired outcomes.
Kudos
Mary’s work has been recognized with many awards, including the Dale Prize, the American Planning Association’s Planning Pioneer Award, and the Louise duPont Crowninshield Award, the highest honor in historic preservation. Mary was also a Loeb Fellow at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. Now mostly retired from active consulting engagements, Mary enjoys public speaking, helping local community organizations achieve their goals, connecting with friends, colleagues, and clients, and traveling the world.