Kennedy Smith is a Senior Researcher for the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, where her work focuses on analyzing the factors that threaten small businesses and on developing program and policy tools that communities can use to level the playing field for small businesses and to build thriving economies.She joined ILSR’s staff in the spring of 2020, and her work quickly focused on helping small businesses survive the COVID-19 pandemic. Her “Big List of COVID-19 Assistance Programs” was visited more than 200,000 times and helped communities throughout the nation create programs to help small businesses survive the COVID-19 pandemic. Her current work includes helping community leaders and activists stop the proliferation of chain dollar stores and strengthening federal government support for small businesses. Her 2023 reports on chain dollar stores – The Dollar Store Invasion (co-authored with Stacy Mitchell and Susan Holmberg), Stop Dollar Store Proliferation in Your Community: A Strategy Guide, and 17 Problems: How Dollar Store Chains Hurt Communities – have been featured in the New York Times, USA Today, and other news media.Kennedy’s work at ILSR builds on her years of on-the-ground experience helping towns and cities throughout North America build vibrant downtowns and neighborhood commercial centers. She served as the director of the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s National Main Street Center for 14 years, where she collaborated with ILSR on issues like highlighting the dangers to small businesses of big-box development. Through her consulting work with the Community Land Use and Economics Group, which she co-founded in 2004, she helped communities throughout the world find solutions to tough revitalization and business development challenges.Kennedy’s work has been featured in news media ranging from the New York Times, Business Week, Governing, and NPR to “CBS Sunday Morning,” and “Marketplace.” She has written numerous articles on the economic dynamics of older business districts and is a popular international speaker on downtown and community economic development issues. She has been honored by Planetizen as one of the "10 Most Influential Contemporary Urbanists (2023), “100 Most Influential Urbanists of All Time” (2017) and one of the “100 Top Urban Thinkers” (2009). Fast Company magazine named her to its first list of “Fast 50 Champions of Innovation,” recognizing “creative thinkers whose sense of style and power of persuasion change what our world looks like and how our products perform.”