Mary Means is a visionary, a leader in the world of community planning. Best known as the creator of the Main Street project at the National Trust for Historic Preservation, Mary took the three pilot communities to scale in the 1980s. It has been said her work on Main Street revitalization provided an alternative narrative to the accepted exodus from cities, enabling civic leaders to make the case for revitalization instead. Today, more than 2,000 communities and neighborhoods corridors form the network that is Main Street America. After leaving the Trust, Mary led Mary Means + Associates, a small but mighty community planning firm for 35+ years. Her firm’s public interest clients included public agencies and nonprofits engaged in heritage-based vision planning, strategic planning, and public-private partnerships that improved town-gown relations. Her work has been recognized with 5 national American Planning Association (APA) Awards, including the 2019 Planning Pioneer Excellence Award and APA’s ‘Hard Won Victory’ award for the Master plan for New Orleans where Mary directed extensive citizen engagement: 11 state APA awards, Federal Design Achievement Award, Design for Transportation Award, and the Dale Prize from Cal Poly Pomona. In 2020 the National Trust gave her the Louis du Pont Crowninshield Award, the highest honor in historic preservation. Her book, Main Street’s Comeback and How It Can Come Back Again was published in 2020. And most importantly for this event, Mary is a homeowner in Hammond Wood, a Charles Goodman community in Montgomery County, MD.