required watching - NEOtropolis

episode #1 is up and streaming...

click here to watch the premiere.



Mr. Mulready, I'll be tuning in next week.

the living cities - friday Oct 17th at 8pm

A live one-hour show produced by the newly renamed Western Reserve PBS will host a discussion responding to Forbes Magazine's labeling of the country's 10 fastest-dying cities (more correctly, dying regional metro areas) - three of which are located in Northeast Ohio.

The program will feature interviews with city officials and business leaders; a review of the statistics used by Forbes to make its assessments; the cities’ economic development plans and neighborhood revitalization projects; plus regionalism efforts.

Also included will be a studio-based conversation during which viewers will be invited to participate through live call-in, e-mail, Twitter and other instant response technology.


you can check out all the people who will be interviewed and involved in the forum on this press release.

- - -

Slightly switching topics, in recent months the regional pbs stations have done some rebranding efforts, and clipping from their interesting self-description:

Western Reserve Public Media is owned and operated by Northeastern Educational Television of Ohio, Inc., a private, nonprofit corporation and consortium of Kent State University, The University of Akron and Youngstown State University.

Western Reserve PBS, a service of Western Reserve Public Media, is the only broadcast television service that reaches all of northeast Ohio. It is available to 1.8 million households and 4.4 million people in the Cleveland and Youngstown designated market areas.

You can check out their archive of Youngstown 2010 shows here, which includes September's broadcast titled "Neighborhoods: Revive to Survive".

Among the topics covered:
- the new Grow Home initiative
- the Garden District
- neighborhood organizations, featuring Idora's
- the highly-visible housing/recreation area/construction in Arlington Heights

"the authentic qualities of a youngstown"

how to market the assets of northeast ohio.

That's the question recently posed to Hunter Morrison, Director of the Center for Urban and Regional Studies at that ol' University in Youngstown. You can watch his response here:



"(northeast ohio) is a phenomonally rich place."

but how to connect ". . . the networks that are there around which you build a unique regional identity - a unique sence of place that had to find strength in diversity" ?

Thanks to George for posting it to his website today.

- - -

Mr. Morrision mentions over and over again in this short clip the substantial amount of assets spread throughout the non-Cleveland cities of northeast ohio. But how to get those folks from Akron, Cleveland, Lorain, etc., to hear about our events, and to get in the car and drive here is an extra challenge.

A previous post on this subject lamented the poor design of a local site, city-arts.net, to do just that.

The site serves as a gateway to other websites, but as of today, there are plenty of links contained within it which are broken. Many other fine and performing organizations and events out there are simply not a part of City Arts. Maybe it's time to either change the format of the site, or retire it.

In the meantime, here are two of the better sites displaying what is going on in Youngstown:

Defend Youngstown contains things to do every week in the city, including hikes through Mill Creek Park, hockey, arena football, and the performing arts. His list might be the best one out there, but to be sure there are many other little smaller events which may be of interest to special niche groups which are too numerous for one person to report.

Maybe an open-source format would work best, like the calendar at the Mahoning Valley info site. A site like this though, is only as good as the regular contributors make it to be. So if you are a reader of this blog from around the state (which I know there are) and you are a reader of the blog associated with groups who do not have updated events on this site (which I know there are), maybe this site could become the best starting point for all those out there who want to see just what in the heck is going on in Ytown.

I checked the schedules and here's my list of recommendations of things to do outside of the sports-music-theater categories in the month of march:

Lewis Black - march 2nd - Powers Auditorium 7pm
Alvin Toffler/Revolutionary Wealth book lecture - march 8th Stambaugh Auditorium 6pm
Blue Man Group - march 8th - Chevy Centre 7:30pm
Steven Levitt/Freakonomics book lecture - march 26th - Stambaugh Auditorium 6pm

perhaps I will see you there...

new years resolution, er, revolution

I really enjoyed a post last week at the blog Word of Mouth. The author details the "Top 7 Things You Can Do To Help Lorain in 2007" for all to act upon, and you can read it here. With a population around 69,000 and an industrial heritage in steel and automobile manufacturing, Lorain could in fact be a sister city of Youngstown.

But one part of the blog really jumped out at me.

Every time you read the word "Lorain" in the next passage, insert "Youngstown". I did it fot the first sentence.

- - -

If you’re reading the WoM (shout youngstown) blog from some outpost other than Lorain (Youngstown), then you obviously are interested in Lorain (Youngstown) and Lorain’s (Youngstown's) well being. Lorain needs people like you so come back home. We have the lake (huge park), we have seething hot politics, a remarkably inexpensive cost of living and hey you can contribute to the revolution.

Conversely, if you’re reading the WoM blog from a study, bedroom or kitchen in Lorain then you defintely are interested in Lorain and Lorain’s well being. So stay. We need you and your care and your passion about Lorain IN Lorain. Don’t give up. We have just begun the revolution.

- - -

And so the revolution is just beginning in Youngstown.

But it needs your help.

From those both inside and outside the city limits.

We need you, and your care and your passion.

Please go and read the post about Lorain if you have the time. It even has some good links to click on about investment property loans, banking locally, and puchasing property in the city.

and happy 2007.

update on NEO stickers

Kudos to Rusty, a reader of this blog who went to The Sticker Cafe and designed a NEO oval sticker.

He worked with their design team on the concept, and a few moments later...

* bamf ! *

Northeast Ohio stickers for the back of your car or office, available for $5 (including shipping)


click here to check them out!

also coming soon in dtown ytown . . .

- - - stage fright - - -
oakland center for the arts
220 w. boardman st.
yo, oh
10.31.06

pre-registration 7-8pm
performances 8-11pm

Just in time for Halloween (the actual day, unlike all the other fakers who are celebrating before 10/31/06)

Featuring:
-- Costume Contest (so please wear a good one if you want a prize)
-- Trick-or-Treat style concessions
-- Special Effects make-up "lesion session" in the gallery from 7-7:45
-- Performances by:
* The ZOU
* Funny Farm stand-up headliners Murad and Ryan
* Local film by Steven Andrew
* B-Movie celebutantes DSK Productions
* Tap Dancer Extraordinnairre B. Martin
* YOU?

come and hang out in youngstown!

$3 at the door -- ticket for free glass of straub [at cedars] for every donation ($2 or more) to the oakland...

tell everyone you ever met, ever. even if you only met them once and don't think they remember you...i bet they do, and they'd be mad if you didn't tell them.

voices and choices : a review

"a small group of thoughtful people can change the world."

"Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has."

Well, I made it over to the big Voices & Choices event in Akron on Saturday.


If you haven't heard of Voices & Choices yet, it's an initiative to create a grassroots, citizen-based, agenda-setting platform to improve the economy and the quality of life in Northeast Ohio, er, along the North Shore.

You can see all the components of the planning process here on this timeline. Last weekend was their second couple-hundred-person Regional Town Meeting, a little more than one year into the entire experiment. Below is a rundown of the event, with opinionated feedback (otherwise this wouldn't be a good blog) about what went down.

First off, I didn't feel like driving to Akron at 7:30am. Luckily, there were shuttles all throughout NEO waiting to take the participants to the destination. Did that seem lazy? Well, in that case, I decided to save gas and carpool to Akron.


Upon arrival, we were able to get some breakfast and meet the others at our table. There were 8 of us sitting around in a circle plus one facilitator, all of different ages, races, and locations within Northeast Ohio.


As the main event started, Dr. Luis Proenza, President of the Univeristy of Akron, made some good remarks about the interconnectedness of Northeast Ohio and the need for innovation and lifelong learners in our region. Dr. Proenza is a big player on the national innovation scene. He is on the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, the Council on Competitiveness, the Council of Foreign Relations, and a member of the executive board of the State Science and Technology Institiue.


Next up was Dr. Carolyn Lukensmeyer - Founder of AmericaSpeaks, President of AmericaSpeaks, and native Northeast Ohioian. She explained the entire program and assisted in asking the questions to discover the demographics of the group in the arena.


Questions were shown on every available screen in the place. They appeared even on the scoreboard.


A sad part was, even though the Mahoning Valley respresents 14% of Northeast Ohio, only 5% of the participants were from the Mahoning Valley. Maybe it was too far to travel with YSU football starting at 3:30pm.


The next few hours were then dedicated to prioritizing goals, establishing criteria, and choosing solutions for the project. Individually we all had our opinions, but aggregately we had a common voice.

In order for that voice to become more clear, it was necessary to choose among our tablemates what solutions we liked the best. So we did what any great decision makers do . . . we put tiddly-winks on our favorite ideas:


And as we were coming to the end, we exchanged emails at our table, agreeing to meet once every three months in a NEO downtown for dinner on a rotating basis . . . and then we stretched . . .


The final opinions were used to create a document that summarized the efforts throughout the day, and were handed to use as we left. You can read the report here.

highlights of the day

- the entertainers and artists were great. It was a cool to incorporate the arts into the day's events. Like the painters who made original pieces as we sat below. Here's a sample of some spoken word:



- line overheard at our table: "wow. this was a lot more fun than I thought this was gonna be."





suggestions for improvement

- Two months ago, I completed an online version of choosing what I felt were the best solutions for Northeast Ohio. There was also a place to leave you own suggestions, which I did. Then the week before the meeting, I received a personalized report (which was nice) that contained my choices to help me when I was at the meeting in Akron. It would have been nice to have the personalized report include the additional suggestions that I left online.

- Mention the fact that the technology used to assist in the real-time responses was developed by a company in Northeast Ohio. Just for the record, Turning Technologies, headquartered in the Youngstown Business Incubator, produced all of the keypads and software that was used to make the immediate powerpoint presentation.

- The spoken word entertainment during lunch was a nice touch. But it's difficult to have verbal communication with the audience when they have all just been served lunch. I felt bad for the people on stage because as more and more food was served, less and less people participated.

- During the day, I overheard some individuals speaking about the availability of full child care services as a problem. They believed certain functions would be taken care of by the sitters (such as changing diapers) that wasn't performed. So then at the last minute, they could not attend because of childcare needs.

what will be the next step?

time to replace my OBX sticker with my NEO sticker?

This evening I listened to an interesting radio interview about the economic development community of Northeast Ohio. You can download the mp3 here. For those of you regular readers from outside of the pierogie-haluski belt, NorthEast Ohio = NEO.

Featured as guests were Tom Waltermine of Team NEO, Ed Morrison from the Institute of Open Economic Networks, and Jay Miller from Crane's Cleveland Business Newspaper. One of the conversation's themes was the developing necessity and ability for the region of Northeast Ohio to network and cooperate together.

So is it important for Northeast Ohio to be better networked culturally as a region before we can move together economically as a region?

And how do we build our shared region-wide culture?

- - -

I know tons of people in Ohio that have the europeanesque 3-letter oval sticker with OBX attached to their rear bumper. It screams to the world, "hey, I'm cool. I went to the Outer Banks one year for vacation. In fact, my uncle has a timeshare down there."


So if people from here sport OBX stickers on their cars, would they ever attach an oval sticker with the letters N-E-O to proclaim their Ohio pride to the universe? Maybe NEO stickers can be like FOP stickers: if you have one on your window, the cops won't give you a speeding ticket. Or if you have a NEO sticker, you can get 1 dollar off parking at the lots in downtown cleveland during a sporting event.

Just think of it: people from around the world will respect your NEO roots and pride. When you are driving in Pittsburgh and incorrectly (although legally) yield to oncoming traffic when making a left hand turn, people will mutter "damn NEO drivers."

Would it ever catch on? . . . maybe . . . maybe not.

A experiement might be to pass them out to all the local economic developers and citizens at the next Voices and Choices meeting. It would be interesting to see if they ever pop up around the region. If 0.25% of the cars in this area sport NEO identification on their back bumper, it may gradually push the concept of "a united region" to more and more individuals.

Youngstowners, go spend your NEO bucks!

First off, I regret that this is my first post of the month. Trying to blog from internet cafes and random people's apartments in eastern europe is a difficult situation to say the least. I have tons of blog ideas in my head right now, and I just need to get them onto the internet.

Getting back to business . . .

Bit by bit over the past two weeks, I have been completing my Voices & Choices Choicebook online. It works like this: over the past two years, the Voices & Choices program has been both identifying the problems of Northeast Ohio's development and collecting possible solutions to our challenges.


The Choicebook is the attempt to have individual residents give their opinions on what solutions should be targeted for implementation. If you are a regular reader of this blog, and have not completed this online survey, please consider doing so.

If you are regular reader from Rome or Paris or Washington DC or Youngstown (thanks for your continual support, by the way) or anywhere, and seek the opportunity to contribute to charting our future, click here to begin.

Each section takes about 8 minutes to compete, and there are six sections. After getting input from the public through these Choicebooks, the results will be aggregated and an agenda will be created.

interactive, searchable things to do in NEO

The other day I was wondering what to do in Youngstown on a Friday night. Do I check out a play at the Oakland, listen to some chamber music in the new DeYor Performing Arts Center, or watch some sports at the convocation center downtown? And maybe if I’m feeling adventurous, I can try and see something different – a visit to Alliance or nearby Kent to see something offered by the local universities.

I could look in a local paper, but it’s only focused on a small geographic section. I can’t see what’s going on at John Carroll or Hiram College without going to their individual websites.

I can go to a site that groups all the local performing arts agencies together such as city-arts.net. But when I go to the site, I have to go to each individual page for each venue. I’m lazy. That’s too much work and too much clicking with not enough comparison.

I want a website that will tell me within so many miles of my zip code, all the things I can go do in a certain proximity to my house. I want to know the cover or ticket price, and I want to find directions to the event.

What I want is something that is a mix between an online airplane ticket travel site such as Sidestep or Travelocity (which allows me to customize my searches) and the calendar function for macintosh computers (which allows me to see all my options in front of me, organized by the day of the week in color by genre).

When you load up Sidestep, you get all flights from one destination to another. You then exclude your options by price, time of flight, connections, etc. to narrow your search.

I want an online system that downloads everything to do in Northeast Ohio during the next week. Then I can exclude (depending on my mood) events that cost more than $10, sporting events, plays, mutli-week exhibitions, and events beyond a 40 mile distance from my house.

I think there are other sites out there such as citysearch, but do they perform good job of capturing the stuff to do in Northeast Ohio? I might be more willing to go to Akron and Warren for some entertainment if I knew what was going on in those cities. Alternately, all you other good people of Northeast Ohio might me more willing to come visit Youngstown if you knew all the interesting stuff we had going on here as of late. A system like this may push more and more of local venues to provide online ticket purchasing and a broader audience as well.

Maybe I would do more throughout all of Northeast Ohio if all the events could be found in one place. All I want is connectivity and convenience.

are there enough voices when making those choices?

I listened to another good podcast over the weekend that was held at the City Club (from December 2005). Speaking first was David Abbott, Director of the George Gund Foundation in Cleveland. He was followed by Carolyn Lukensmeyer, President of AmericaSpeaks in Washington DC, the organization administering the Voices & Choices forum for Northeast Ohio.

If you haven’t heard of Voices & Choices, it’s a pretty cool idea. A bunch of philanthropic and civic organizations pooled together their resources to form the “Fund for Our Economic Future”. The “Fund” has contributed to a variety of recent economic development efforts including local grants, economic benchmark reports, and the Voices & Choices forum.

There are a variety of approaches that communities can follow to create strategies for economic development. One is to hire outside consultants to analyze a region and make recommendations. Another angle is more of a “bottom-up” approach, which is to collect the opinions of the citizens and leaders of a region, collectively using their thoughts to identify the strengths of a region, and plot a course dedicated to the desires of the public. Voices & Choices takes the latter approach, and to date have successfully completed many interviews, and community and region-wide meetings to collect information. Some of their findings can be found here.

Abbott and Lukensmeyer do a good job in explaining Northeast Ohio’s changing role in an über-competitive global economy, as well as presenting the preliminary results in their search for consensus from public opinion. They espouse the Surowieckian (a new word I think) view that the best decisions are made by large and diverse groups.

But two components of their speech made me ponder possible gaps in the methodology:

The first statement that initiated contemplation is the often used and scary statistic that around fifty percent of the students in the region’s central urban school districts do not graduate from high school. My question is this: do high-school dropouts have a voice within Voices & Choices? Their agenda right now is entering a phase of interviews with thousands of individuals around the region. My only concern is that the civic-minded people who care about the region constitute the overwhelming majority of the interviewees. Perhaps a geographically diverse, age diverse, and racially diverse group is being interviewed – but maybe there are other sectors of diversity that can be reached out to as well.

When I send a mass email to my friends inviting them to participate in something, usually other college-educated twenty-somethings are the recipients. I’m not trying to be non-diverse, it’s just that's who compromises the majority of my social contacts so far in life. I just hope the extension of the social network chain in the Voices & Choices interview process is picking up the most diverse group possible.

The second statement that got my attention was the immense concentration of these interviews that will take place with other Northeast Ohioans. It made me wonder that if only residents of NEO are interviewed, this may also be a less diverse bunch. As an experiment, it would be interesting to use the alumni organizations of local universities (or another group) to initiate interviews with former residents of the area, and see if there is a difference in the responses. This idea may contrast with the concept that the best base for decision-making is the people that live here, but it can also be said that people who left may have an interesting point of view, including diverse reflections and suggestions. Now that they have left the area and seen outside of the region, they might have extremely valuable ideas.

Regardless of who you are, I’m sure the people at Voices & Choices would care about your opinions. (to my surprise they made a link to my two-month old blog off their own blog site). Click here to find out how to get involved and have your opinions heard.

City Club strikes again

No sooner than I created this post about the growing movement to insert youth into the board of directors for community organizations, did another fine program from the City Club find its way into my iTunes.

Today's installement was by Gene Krebs, who is the State Director of Greater Ohio, an organization committed to "promoting — through research, public education and grassroots advocacy — public policy to grow our economy and improve our quality of life through intelligent land use." Gene addressed the issue of eminent domain, especially in the sense of what causes these land use struggles to be created in the first place. You can (and should) listen to the entire hour-long presentation here.

a couple of interesting statistics he cited in his presentation:

In the past six years in Ohio . . .
- the poverty rate has increased from 12% to 17% of the population.
- the unemployment rate has increased from 4.3% to 6%
- number of people on Medicade has increased 45%
- number of people using food stamps has increased 29%
- has become the number one state in mortgage foreclosures.

Besides these statistics, he also had two lines in his speech which screamed out to me:

..."they [the growing knowledge-based employee set] carry their manufacturing plants on their head - these are their smokestacks. And they will locate their manufacturing plant where there are good shops, high-speed internet access, in a walkable community that enables a certain quality of life."

"Ohio is still focused on 1970s-style smokestack chasing instead of the strategic marketing of its strengths and pursuit of sustainable economic activity. Now our state and local devleopment agencies act as real estate agents for companies searching for areas with cheaper taxes"

Do you agree with him?

I believe the eminent domain topic is heating up in Youngstown, especially with the issue of the university planning to connect more to the downtown, and the existing proposal to acquire property to create an extension of Hazel Street through mostly blighted, but occasionally inhabited property.

Gene makes the astute remark that politicians hate using the eminent domain option and follows it up with some examples. He continues to elaborate more in his speech on some solutions. Click here to see their well-conceived policy agenda.

Cool. I was really excited to discover this organization today. (Did you know they have a Mahoning Valley representative?) I still want to learn more about this organization. Their spring 2006 briefing can be found here. Maybe you can read it with me, and provide some ideas for future posts on this website.

RECENT UPDATE: Just found this whilel surfing their site: Gene Krebs will be in Youngstown NEXT WEEK on May 18th giving a presentation at the Fellows Riverside Gardens at Milk Creek Park. The event will be a lunch at noon ($10), with policy discussions and breakout sessions to follow. Mayor Jay Williams will also be a presenter. For more information and to register, click here.