What do you love most about downtown Marietta? Our unique shops? Beautiful, historic buildings? The sense of community you feel when waving hi to fellow pedestrians? Our hanging flower baskets? These are the four most popular responses we at Main Street hear when we ask others the same question, and the most popular of all is our downtown flowers.
Our classic purple petunias - the purple wave - has been with Marietta for years and has become a signature of our spring and summer months. Tourists travel miles upon miles to experience Marietta and locals increase their downtown visits during these months. Registers ring more frequently in our downtown shops, events happen nearly every weekend, and local photographers roll up their sleeves and add hours to their work day to capture the beauty of our downtown streetscapes - much to the contribution of our beautiful downtown flowers.
Marietta Main Street is the sole coordinator of our downtown beautiful program. Managed by our Design Committee, and most recently in collaboration with Marietta in Bloom, we work annually to develop a design for the continuation of our flowers, submit for grant funding, give a thumbs up to Jay Huck of L.E. Huck & Sons Greenhouses to plant seeds and care for our purple beauties, coordinate volunteers to transport and hang our flowers, and welcome a part-time staff member to our payroll May through September to put in no less than 3 hours of work every day, including weekends, to water and maintain our flowers. Marietta's downtown beautification program requires dedicated efforts and significant planning to continue making our City beautiful, and we are grateful for the tremendous support of all who work to help Marietta Main Street.
After months and months of planning, within the past few weeks one of the most important components of our downtown beautification program fell through: we no longer have funding or dedicated staff to maintain our flowers.
We are in dire need of YOUR help! We need to fundraise no less than $4k to ensure our downtown beautification program stays strong not only for this spring and summer, but for years and years to come.
Please consider making a donation of significance TODAY to help Marietta Main Street in these efforts! All donor will be listed with gratitude on our website, unless otherwise noted as anonymous. All donations are 100% tax-deductible.
UPDATE
Thanks to the incredibly kind and giving hearts of our community, as of May 12th - a whopping 3 days after the initial launch of the Save Our Flowers Campaign - we've successfully fundraised $4,350.00 of our $4k goal! Wow! All donations that are contributed towards downtown beautification above and beyond the $4k amount will be maintained in a restricted fund for future downtown beautification efforts.
Annually, Marietta Main Street fundraises and writes grants to cover the ~$12k in costs for our downtown beautification program, which includes the hanging flower baskets, baskets over the Putnam Street Bridge, our flag program, downtown clean up and more.
Our downtown beautification program is only made possible due to the support of our volunteers and our donors. We are SO grateful to each and every one of you!
