What makes a city a place people are proud to call home? It’s easy to point to the visible things: thriving local businesses, public art, live music, community events, restaurants filled with familiar faces, and gathering places where people actually want to spend their time. Those things, however, don’t happen simply because someone builds a building or opens a business. They happen when people decide their community is worth investing in.
In Downtown Casper, Wyoming, that belief has brought together organizations, business owners, artists, community leaders and volunteers who increasingly recognize that making downtown better isn’t a competition. Improving the community is a shared responsibility, and a stronger downtown creates more opportunities for everyone who lives, works and does business there.
Choosing Community Over Competition
For Whitney Asay, the phrase was on a bumper sticker. She was driving behind one of the vendors from Funky Junk, the market she founded years before becoming Executive Director of David Street Station, when she noticed the words: Community Over Competition.
“I thought to myself, that’s why they’re a Funky Junker,” Asay recalled. “That’s why they’re part of this.” The phrase gave a name to something she had already watched take shape in Downtown Casper.
“I used to hear that downtown was a bunch of islands,” Asay said. “No one was really communicating. Everybody was just doing their own thing.” She sees something different now. “We all want to see people coming downtown,” she said. “That’s what this is about.”
Lindsey Grant, Executive Director of The Lyric, describes it another way. “Rising tides lift all boats,” she said. “When we support each other, we all become stronger.”
Laura Hunter, Executive Director of Art 321, shares that philosophy. “If you’re doing well, it’s easier for me to do well,” she said. For example, a recent Art Walk brought approximately 750 people through Art 321. Those visitors might also eat at a restaurant, stop for a drink or discover another downtown business. Someone coming for a concert at David Street Station might wander into the gallery. “The more we collaborate, the more people we bring downtown,” Hunter said. “That helps all of us.”
Sharing More Than an Audience
That collaboration extends beyond sharing customers and visitors. “If somebody needs something, there’s a willingness to step up,” Grant said. Sometimes that means lending tables and chairs, offering space or making an introduction. Other times, it means sharing an idea instead of guarding it. “We don’t have to hold onto ideas for our own survival,” Grant said. “We need all of us to survive.”
The Lyric offers another example. Casper already has live music at David Street Station, local bars and other venues. The Lyric is intended to fill a different need: a permanent home for the performing arts. “It’s not about competing with what already exists,” Grant said. “It’s about adding something Casper doesn’t have and giving people another reason to be here.”
Melissa Hugget found that same collaborative spirit almost immediately after becoming Executive Director of the Casper Downtown Development Authority. Her first day included lunch with her board. Her second included coffee with Asay and Hunter. “I can’t tell you how welcomed and reassured I felt,” Hugget said. As a staff of one entering a new role, she found people willing to answer questions, make connections and help.
“We’re cheerleaders for one another,” Hugget said. “We all want to bring people downtown. When one of us has a successful event, we all celebrate.” For Hugget, that shared goal is bigger than organizational or geographic boundaries. “We each have our own goals and missions,” she said. “But when we come together, we can strengthen the shared goals and missions. It’s taking a 50,000-foot view to see the common ground and vision for Downtown.”
That wider view can be seen in efforts ranging from downtown events to a recent cleanup organized by Hugget and City of Casper Downtown Development Manager Liz Becher, where more than 40 volunteers removed more than 530 pounds of trash, weeds and debris.
It also exists in less visible ways. “There’s a generosity of knowledge here,” Grant said. “People will say, ‘Have you tried this? Have you thought about that? Have you talked to so-and-so?’”
Instead of asking, How do we get more for ourselves?, the question becomes: How do we make the Greater Downtown better?
Showing Up For Future Generations
For more than two decades, the story of Downtown Casper has been shaped by people willing to believe in what the community could become. Today, there’s a bigger question underneath that work: What kind of Casper are we building for the next generation?
Economic development is important. Investment, new businesses and good jobs all help a community grow, but people don’t choose a hometown from a spreadsheet. They choose communities with energy, identity and opportunity. Places where they can build a life, raise children, pursue their interests and feel like they belong. That’s why community development and economic development are so closely connected.
When deciding where to build a career or raise a family, people aren’t comparing one Casper organization to another. They’re comparing the experience of living here to the experience they could have somewhere else. For Hunter, that idea is personal. Both of her children returned to Casper after college, and she wants to help create a community where they, and someday her grandchildren, want to stay. “We get to work with people who care about Casper and want to leave it better than they found it,” she said.
Grant felt a similar responsibility when she moved back to Casper. “If I’m going to live here, I want to help make it the community I want to live in,” she said. She started by volunteering with a Downtown Development Authority marketing committee. That involvement led to relationships and more opportunities to contribute. Her advice to someone else who wants to make a difference is simple: “Start by showing up.”
The Next Chapter
Downtown Casper’s next chapter won’t be written by one person, organization, business or project. It will be written the same way so much of its progress already has been: by people willing to look beyond their own piece of the community and ask what they can build together. Because when the goal is a stronger Downtown Casper, someone else’s success isn’t competition. It’s progress.
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