Welcome! Please introduce yourself, let us know a little bit about you, and where you are from.

I'll go first - Mike Hudson and I am founder of Progress And Main.  I'm from Williamsburg but I've Lived in Blacksburg since the early 1990's and I've lived in Downtown - in the Bennett Hill / Progress neighborhood since 1998. I've worked for a variety places around town doing everything from delivering pizzas to reading for the blind and being a Gardner.  These day's I run my own small business repairing computers, building web sites and tutoring on a variety of programs .  I still do a little gardening too.  I'm pretty involved with my neighborhood group and I've been on the Town / Gown Community Relations Committee since 2006

I started Progress And Main as a way to connect individuals across the Blacksburg community and spark conversations.  I was quickly asked to expand the scope to cover the greater New River Valley.  That seems like it was a good idea since my first group was started by a member from Riner.

I Hope to see you use Progress And Main to help build a stronger, more informed community and to actually get people face to face.

Specifically, I like to try to accomplish these things -

• To facilitate sustainable living
• To become a resource for a broad spectrum of information pertinent to local issues
• To help our growing student populations quickly develop a "sense of place" in our local communities, to understand the history and the biology around them when their off campus
• To help support our locally owned businesses and advance local arts and community projects
• To advocate for local wage employees as well the areas low income folks
• To bridge the Town / Gown divide by offering everyone a social network and on-line sharing resources that are not university log-in / PID dependent and provide a great deal of related content on College towns and how they are solving their issues
• I'd also like to use the technology here to change the way we interact with our government by keeping public, internet assessable records of requests or reports to them.

In the end it all comes down to to improving the quality of life in our neighborhoods.

That's not all, but that's all for now.

Join me here at Progress And Main - A complicated intersection with great things in every direction

Mike Hudson