Opportunity Winona

Investing in our community to create new growth & opportunity in Winona

Cities today each face the same challenge: recruiting new residents, businesses and industries, retirees, tourists, and others while keeping those already there engaged. The City of Winona faces these same challenges. This is why Winona leaders launched an effort known as Opportunity Winona to encourage investment in the downtown area to create new jobs, housing, and commercial activity that are meant to benefit the entire community.   

Opportunity Winona, a public-private partnership, was established in 2015 with the vision to revitalize downtown Winona through public and private capital investments. It is a collaborative effort between public and private entities, the Port Authority of Winona, the City of Winona, the Winona Area Chamber of Commerce, Winona Main Street, and other community leaders and organizations, with the purpose to encourage and facilitate investments downtown. In order to do this, Opportunity Winona facilitates various projects focused on making sure downtown continues to be a place everyone in Winona wants to be by securing funding and developing public-private partnerships with a single purpose: to energize downtown.

Opportunity Winona is a series of projects connected by a single vision focused on our city’s downtown that will bring new vitality into our downtown and sustain these improvements for years to come, while creating an environment that fully utilizes existing buildings, develops key sites in the downtown area, and creates public connections that will bring people together in our downtown.

Winona’s downtown is its connection to its history and the Mississippi River. Opportunity Winona fosters partnerships and brings together resources as never before from a wide array of community businesses, institutions, and governmental entities with a focus on the heart of the city that will make residents proud, encourage visitors to return, and inspire new businesses and residents to set down roots in Winona.