BY KADIE TAYLOR
THE OBSERVER
OPELIKA — Opelika Main Street leadership released the 2025 Annual Report, showing the growth of the organization and the support it provided to local businesses throughout last year.
“Our strategies or objectives for 2025 were to reintroduce, re-educate, re-engage and rebuild,” said Opelika Main Street Executive Director Kelsey Sullivan. “I felt like, with those four terms, we were able to kind of rebuild our organization and set the foundation in order for us to move one step forward. [We wanted to] start some new things and improve things we already do well — so that was the objective.”
Having started her role a little over a year ago, Sullivan said she had goals for Opelika Main Street — and was able to accomplish those goals.
“When I came in in January, I had a 30, 60 and 90-day plan that I shared with the board in my interviews of what I would do when I came in — and we completed all of those objectives,” she said. “The biggest things are that we expanded our board and we refilled our board. We were down to like four board members, which is below our minimum. We were able to fill the board easily — we are now up to 15 board members with three ex officio members.”
Throughout 2025, Sullivan said she was able to support local business owners through increasing visitors attending events and awarding grants to help businesses with improvements.
“When I came in, we had had some money from Main Street Alabama, through the Small Business Association, to do some Marketing Grants of $1,000,” she said. “So that was a fun thing, to come in immediately, and be able to hand out $5,000 worth of grants to our businesses. We had eight new businesses move to downtown during 2025. We awarded four Facade Grants completely last year with a total of a little over $33,000 [in funding] and [there are] six more in progress right now.
“We held all of our wonderful events and added a new one, the Victorian Front Porch Tour Pub Crawl,” she said. “We did a Downtown Bingo event, and added Downtown Dollars. We won awards, which was very exciting — in year one — to be recognized at the state level for what we’ve done… We had 16,000 visitors across six events. We captured 1,500 volunteer hours with 165 volunteers, and our social media engagement increased by 20% [we had] 1.67 million views on social media. We were getting out there, people were viewing our stuff and they were seeing all the things that were happening downtown.”
As Sullivan reflected on the growth she saw in 2025, she said she is looking forward to continuing to encourage shopping small and participation in Opelika Main Street events in 2026.
“In 2026, I’m most excited about promoting our businesses more,” she said. “I’m very excited about some opportunities that we have for our businesses to collaborate with each other — and us kind of being with each person — pushing them to do things — along with highlighting our businesses in an even better way than we have before. I think that is the thing I’m most excited about, because I want them to be successful and I want them to have foot traffic downtown. I love when I see people walking past our building. I love watching the people go back and forth every day.”
For more information, visit www.opelikamainstreet.org or Opelika Main Street on Facebook.
