One of the best parts of my job is meeting incredible women leaders of the Main Street movement. Two weeks ago, I had the honor of sitting down with Maxine Clark, a Main Street board member in the Delmar neighborhood of St. Louis, Missouri. She is also an entrepreneur, a philanthropist, and a leader in community and economic development. We spoke about her background in advocacy and business, her passion for her neighborhood, and the importance of resiliency and leadership.

A Life of Advocacy

Maxine’s parents encouraged her leadership skills from a young age. While growing up in Coral Gables, Florida, she watched her mom raise money and advocate for what she believed was right — most ardently around the rights of the differently-abled as part of Eleanor Roosevelt’s traveling secretarial team. Inspired by her mom’s hard work, Maxine decided that she would dedicate her life to business leadership and serving her community.

As a teenager, Maxine was editor of her high school newspaper. She heard a rumor that the custodial staff made more money than the teachers. Looking to verify this, Maxine went to the library, but they didn’t have any information about it, so she went to the Miami Herald. When the Herald had incomplete data, her mom drove her to Tallahassee so she could look at the Department of Education records of all public school employees in the state. And it was true. The custodians’ unions were better advocates for their salaries than the teachers’ unions. Maxine wrote an op-ed advocating for higher teacher wages that was published in the school newspaper. Later, her journalism teacher, Mrs. Adams, submitted her op-ed for a college scholarship program, allowing Maxine to be the first in her family to go to college.

A Proud Career in Business

After college, a job with May Department Stores brought Maxine to Missouri, where her boss and mentor, David Farrell, asked her to research a company run by two Polish immigrants called Payless Shoes. The owners were looking for an exit, and the May Company was interested in buying. Maxine researched the company and recommended it as a good investment. A dozen years later, she became the President of Payless Shoes, where she originated the idea for Payless Kids. 

Her experience running Payless and later founding and running Build-A-Bear Workshop shows up in the way that she talks about Main Streets today. She’s keenly focused on testing with customers. But she also speaks of the larger systemic issues, which she describes as a tangle of knots; you have to untangle many strands to break the knot of poverty. And much of her work with Main Streets attempts to do just that.

Investing in Delmar

Today, Maxine is the founder and major investor in the Delmar DivINe, an adaptive reuse project at the former St. Luke’s Hospital. This facility currently provides 150 mixed-income apartments and houses more than 40 nonprofit organizations. The next phase of the project will add 81 low-income workforce apartments, along with additional community services and new nonprofit tenants. I was interested in hearing her perspective on how an adaptive reuse project can work to untangle the interwoven knots of poverty and disinvestment.

During our conversation, we walked into the GreaterHealth Pharmacy. Run by Founder and CEO Marcus Howard and Head Pharmacist Kenneth Powell, this community health center operates within Delmar DivINe. It’s a pharmacy, but it’s also the only urgent care clinic easily accessible to the Delmar neighborhood. The model centers the pharmacist as an accessible person, a friendly face, who can offer quality healthcare to people in their daily lives.

As a business model, GreaterHealth has a strong ​“bricks and clicks” approach, delivering 90% of its sales directly to clients. Of course, there is a reliable in-person component, too: people can set up new prescriptions and pick up their medications in-store, and doctors’ visits are in person. The delivery service is important and robust. For example, anyone on diabetes or hypertension medication also receives a bag of fresh vegetables and recipe ideas through a nonprofit partnership that they have with Operation Food Source.

Maxine and Marcus make a powerful duo. They both have a strong entrepreneurial drive and deep wisdom about how inequity affects people in their community
 

A Community in Recovery

The most sobering part of the visit was seeing this powerful visionary spirit in the midst of a neighborhood still recovering from a recent tornado that devastated this area of St. Louis in May. Tarps covered the roofs and wood boards covered the windows on some of the most beautiful historic buildings I’ve ever seen in my life.

What was particularly hard to swallow about the situation in Delmar from a Main Street perspective is that because so many people have been forced to leave their homes, the commercial corridor is suffering from a lack of local customers. A significant number of St. Louis residents have already left the city. ​“This is our Katrina; nearly three months after the disaster, we’re still very much grappling with the immediate shock,” said Maxine.

At Main Street America, we talk a lot about resilience — making sure that commercial corridors come back from the shocks of disaster, whether it’s violence or a flood. Each disaster is a little different, but they all test the resilience of our downtown districts. Delmar Main Street has urgent challenges, but their team is fortunate to be led by Director Felice McClendon, who is so wise and so intimately understands the history and issues of the neighborhood. The program works in partnership with the Missouri Main Street Connection program, led by Gayla Roten, another visionary leader. 

Amid these great challenges, it’s heartening to know that as innovators like Maxine, Felice, and Gayla do their urgent work, the Main Street network is there to provide the steady drumbeat of support and resources. But just as Joplin, Missouri, needed so much additional support in 2011, so does Delmar today. For the people in St. Louis, this certainly feels like Katrina, but the national attention is quite different. These great leaders — Felice, Maxine, Gayla, and so many others — deserve our attention and support.