The best ideas often come from the grassroots.

Just ask the Farmville Downtown Partnership, which recently solicited and received some outstanding ideas for downtown vitalization as part of its first-ever SOUP event. Twenty-plus entries were narrowed by a committee to five, which competed for citizens’ votes at an evening social hosted by the Longwood Center for the Visual Arts.

In a format comparable to the hit television show “Shark Tank,” presenters had 5 minutes each to make their best pitch, then fielded questions from the audience. Participants were allowed to vote for more than one project. That’s a good thing, because choosing a single idea would have been difficult.

Winners of grant money for implementation of their ideas were:

• Charles Repp, a visiting Longwood University professor who suggested mounting bicycle racks on parking meters along Main Street to encourage cyclists to eat and shop downtown.

• Centra Southside Hospital’s Kerry Mossler, who proposed bistro tables and chairs on downtown sidewalks.

• Virginia Children’s Book Festival Director Juanita Giles, who pitched a mobile book cart to promote reading.

Great ideas all, and they’re coming to fruition simply because the Downtown Partnership asked citizens for input.

Hats off to Joe Gills, a partnership volunteer who got the idea from a similar program in Detroit and agreed to coordinate Farmville’s first Soup effort. We hope it’s the first of many more to come.