Marshalltown Central Business District, Inc

By the early 2000s, downtown Marshalltown's historic commercial core — built up block by block between the 1860s and the 1940s along Main Street — was in need of a champion. In 2002, that champion arrived not as a single leader but as a group: a handful of local volunteers and community leaders who believed downtown deserved dedicated, organized advocacy. That year, they formed what would become the Marshalltown Central Business District (MCBD) and set out to earn Marshalltown a place among Iowa's official Main Street communities.

The timing mattered. Main Street Iowa had been established by the Iowa Legislature in 1985 as a program of the Iowa Economic Development Authority, built on the National Main Street Center's “Four-Point Approach” of Economic Vitality, Organization, Promotion, and Design. Joining that network gave Marshalltown's new volunteer group access to training, design assistance, and a community of practice with Main Street programs across the state and the country. Fittingly, 2002 was also the year the Marshalltown Downtown Historic District was listed on the National Register of Historic Places, recognizing the very buildings the new organization had committed itself to saving.

From the start, MCBD ran on volunteer energy and modest, steady support: the City of Marshalltown committed $24,000 a year beginning in 2002, supplemented by memberships and fundraising, while volunteers did much of the work of running events, recruiting business support, and courting building owners. It was, as one 2017 account of the organization put it, “a small organization driven by volunteer efforts of community leaders” — and it produced outsized results. Within its first fifteen years, MCBD helped facilitate more than $29 million in downtown building renovations and $17 million in property sales, created more than 30 recurring downtown events, and logged over 50,000 volunteer hours, alongside grant-writing help and business training for downtown entrepreneurs. Twenty-five buildings in the historic district received new facades, code upgrades, or full renovations, part of an investment in downtown that would eventually top $100 million.

That founding commitment was tested in 2018, when a tornado tore through downtown Marshalltown, damaging more than 95 percent of the historic district's buildings. MCBD worked alongside Main Street Iowa and the Iowa Economic Development Authority on a recovery master plan, carrying the same organizing spirit that had built the group in 2002 into the work of rebuilding it.

Today, MCBD is still a nonprofit built on that same foundation — volunteers, city partnership, and a place in the national Main Street America network of more than 1,600 communities — working toward its mission to foster a safe, inviting, and inclusive downtown, so people spend time and money downtown. What began in 2002 as a small group determined to give downtown Marshalltown a voice is, more than two decades later, still doing exactly that.