Welcome to the very first of hopefully many monthly updates on Project Southtown – a new revitalization effort for our corner of the world located at 11th and South Grand streets in Springfield.

This past month the Project Southtown Kickstarter campaign ended with a successful $7,100+ raised. Yesterday we held an open Black Sheep roundtable meeting to talk about some immediate projects we felt need to be taken on to get the ball rolling on Project Southtown and many more projects to come. Some of those immediate projects included:

– Prepping the recently demolished wall on the side of Dumb Records (pictured above) and getting ready for a new Southtown mural.
– Purchasing new outdoor ashtrays to use instead of buckets to clean up cigarette butts.
– Purchasing new woodchips to go underneath benches behind Black Sheep.
– Building new signage for the front of Dumb Records.
– Purchasing a bike rack for public use.
– A tab on our site for Project Southtown (a separate site will come later).

We agreed on having a workday to start prepping the wall (pictured above) this upcoming Saturday. We plan on being outside working from 12:00 pm to 6:00 pm, and there will also be a vegan potluck at 3:00 pm, so anyone is welcome to come out and help us work, and enjoy some free food!

Incentives for Project Southtown are also already being gathered and shipped out. We will be contacting individual donors this month to hunt down shirt sizes, and Brian Galecki is still working up a t-shirt design for Project Southtown.

Digitizing of the Skank Skates VHS tapes are already underway, with one full half hour clip already done and up online right here. Other clips are also being worked on, as well as a website where we can host all of the video tapes in an organized fashion. Some paperwork has also already been submitted for Project Southtown’s new non-for-profit status- a process which may still take up to six months to go through. However while we are waiting for that the project will still be continuing at full speed.