Neighborhoods

Thursday, July 27, 2023. 

Mark your calendars for the Glenwood Avenue Festival, a free and fun community event at the Youngstown Playhouse on Saturday, August 19, 2023 from 12pm to 5pm! The event is family friendly and will have something for everyone.

The Kids Zone will have a bounce house, games, cookie decorating, face painting, fire truck, police car, and mobile library. The food trucks will include TortaMo, ST’s, Karter’s Korner, Melina’s Sweet and Savory Treats, Tra’s Gourmet Sandwiches, and Astia’s Sweet Lemonade. Entertainment will be provided by DJ Jocko and the Slay Steppas Line Dance Team. The event will also have community resources available including the Mercy Health Dental Van and others.

Parking is available at the Youngstown Playhouse and multiple surrounding locations. See you at the Glenwood Avenue Festival at the Youngstown Playhouse, 600 Playhouse Lane on Saturday, August 19, 2023 from 12pm to 5pm!

Thursday, July 27, 2023. 

Beginning in June, the Youngstown Housing Task Force started convening again to address housing quality and problem properties. The task force is currently focused on reviewing and supporting relevant local, state, and federal housing policy, and holding problem landlords accountable for the condition of their properties.

The Youngstown Housing Task Force is a diverse group of Youngstown neighborhood leaders working together to ensure all people in Youngstown and the Mahoning Valley have safe, fair, and quality housing. If you are interested in learning more about the housing task force please contact Kayshia Washington at 234.228.9349. 

Thursday, July 27, 2023. 

On Thursday, July 27, YNDC was presented a Dominion Community Impact Award with a $10,000 prize for our work revitalizing the Glenwood Plaza. In 2022, YNDC transformed the vacant, fire-damaged commercial plaza on Glenwood Avenue in Youngstown into a vibrant hub of neighborhood activity that is now fully occupied with minority-owned and neighborhood-serving businesses that have created economic opportunity for residents while meeting neighborhood quality-of-life needs.The project has generated $2 million in reinvestment to date, created/retained 23 jobs, and served thousands of people who live in the surrounding neighborhoods. Many thanks to the Dominion Foundation for the recognition!
 

The Dominion Energy Charitable Foundation is proud to announce new partnerships with 11 nonprofit organizations that have made significant contributions to communities across Ohio. The Community Impact Awards totaling $110,000 will support economic empowerment and social revitalization. Dominion Energy presented the grants as part of an awards ceremony today at The Cleveland Botanical Gardens. Cleveland Magazine is a proud cosponsor.

Since 1996, the program has awarded more than $2 million across Dominion Energy’s service area of Allen, Ashland, Ashtabula, Auglaize, Belmont, Carroll, Columbiana, Cuyahoga, Geauga, Guernsey, Hardin, Holmes, Knox, Lake, Mahoning, Medina, Mercer, Monroe, Noble, Paulding, Portage, Putman, Shelby, Stark, Summit, Trumbull, Tuscarawas, Van Wert, Washington, Wayne and Wood Counties. “It’s a pleasure to honor organizations that address community needs to lift individuals and families across Ohio,” said Dan Weekley, President & General Manager of Dominion Energy Ohio. “This program has an highly competitive application process. We wish we could honor them all. We see firsthand that Ohio nonprofits are doing incredible work in our communities. Our sincerest congratulations to our award recipients who create vibrant communities for fellow Ohioans.”

Applications were open to eligible organizations in Dominion Energy Ohio’s service area. 2022 Community Impact Award honorees in Ohio include:

Akron: 2 honorees; $20,000 in grants
Canton: 2 honorees; $20,000 in grants
Cleveland: 5 honorees; $50,000 in grants
Lima: 1 honoree; $10,000 grant
Youngstown: 1 honoree; $10,000 grant

In Cleveland, the SuperHero Project uses the arts to empower youth with serious illnesses, disabilities and other complex medical needs. The Power Posters Program, recently featured in People Magazine, connected nearly 475 kids who were depicted as superheroes in their own stories. The program encourages them to dream beyond their diagnoses. 

The Village of Healing (VOH) provided equitable and culturally sensitive health care for Black women in Cuyahoga County. The group was honored for opening the first and only OB-GYN clinic in the county with an all-Black provider care team for Black women. In five months, the team delivered care through more than 500 appointments. VOH envisions expanding into pediatrics and adding a second site in Cleveland.

Upcycle Parts Shop in Cleveland created an arts program to teach students how to design rapid prototype business plans to address social problems. Students made dog beds from used clothing, provided DJ services to schools with under-resourced music programs, built homes for homeless populations and more. Since 2019, Upcycle Parts Shop has offered this program to 17 elementary and middle schools and 18 high schools reaching more than 2,000 students.

Grace House Akron was honored for its compassionate program that provides end of life care to older adults with nowhere to go. The program focuses on basic physical needs as well as emotional and spiritual support for the area’s most vulnerable population. Volunteers provided more than 1,600 hours of care, allowing individuals to pass peacefully without financial barriers.

The Youngstown Neighborhood Development Corporation transformed a vacant, fire-damaged commercial plaza into a facility that houses three minority-owned businesses and five neighborhood-serving programs. 

To read the full story from Dominion Energy News, click here. 

A Youngstown area nonprofit based around restoring homes and building communities has received a $10,000 award from Dominion Energy, according to a release. The grant funding was awarded to the Youngstown Neighborhood Development Corporation by Dominion during their 28th annual Dominion Energy Community Impact Awards Ceremony in Cleveland on Thursday.

To read the full story from WFMJ, click here. 

“Located halfway between Pittsburgh and Cleveland, Youngstown is still reflective of the steel industry’s collapse in the 1970s. But this Rust Belt city is in the midst of a cultural and economic renaissance that combines rich historical tradition with the zeal of a new generation,” U.S. News & World Report says. “The area is seeing a resurgence of business in its once-empty downtown area, including restaurants, bars, galleries and local shops, while organizations like the Youngstown Neighborhood Development Corporation seek to shore up the urban neighborhoods. The strong work ethic the region is known for is helping to make the revival happen.

To read the full story from Cleveland.com, click here. 

A project being proposed by Councilman Julius Oliver that would support entrepreneurs and the city’s youth is “designed to incubate community,” the First Ward councilman said. The project will face a key vote Monday night, when Oliver and his colleagues on City Council will consider an ordinance to fund the purchase of a building (pictured above) where the proposed community center – although he hesitates to call it that – would be located. “It’s not actually a community center. It is, but it’s way more,” he clarified.

If approved by council members, the legislation would allocate to the Western Reserve Port Authority $150,000 of the $2 million of the American Rescue Plan Act funds designated for projects in the First Ward. The funds would be used to purchase a former Meridian HealthCare building at 64 Ridge Ave. The port authority’s board of directors approved a resolution in June to accept the ARPA funds and to acquire the property on the city’s behalf.

The center that Oliver envisions would provide incubation space for small businesses. As a condition of tenancy, the business owners would be required to permit high school-age youth to shadow them. That would not only acquaint them with what the business owner does – potentially planting the seeds for teens to start their own businesses later – but also introduce them to people in the neighborhoods so they potentially would be less inclined to cause mischief in the community. The initiative also addresses a specific unmet need for local youth, he said. While there are several programs that deal with youth who are struggling, at risk or in trouble already, there are no programs to “deal with good kids and make sure they never become bad kids,” he asserted.

“It prevents little Johnny from breaking into Ms. Johnson’s house because he knows Ms. Johnson,” Oliver said.    “We don’t have any programming that strategically raises our kids to become great community members,” he continued. Many youth programs are geared around athletics, which doesn’t interest everyone, he added. Oliver said he became familiar with the concept when he accompanied Bonnie Deutsch Burdman, director of community relations and government affairs for the Youngstown Area Jewish Federation, on a trip to Israel in 2020. While there, they visited the Akko Center for Arts & Technology, also known as A-CAT, which exposes children of various cultural backgrounds to multiple occupations.

A-CAT is part of the network of such centers – including the Hope Center for Arts & Technology in Sharon, Pa. – that follow the model of the Pittsburgh-based Manchester Bidwell Corp. to help people get themselves out of poverty, according to Burdman. Akko, a city in the northwest part of Israel, is one of the most diverse areas of the nation. “There’s a tremendous need in the city of Youngstown and surrounding areas for solid growth opportunities for area youth,” Burdman said.

While there are several youth-oriented programs locally, none fulfill “a workforce development type of role where you can capture kids at an early age, teach them life skills, dignity, etc., and ultimately have them grow into adults with the direction of what they want to do with their lives,” she said. “We’re basically killing two birds with one stone, all of it designed to serve the community with the purpose of sustaining neighborhoods again,” Oliver said. “Youngstown used to be full of mom-and-pop shops all over the place. We want to reintroduce that into our future generations with this programming.” Ian Beniston, executive director of the Youngstown Neighborhood Development Corp., was involved with early discussions regarding the concept. “Generally speaking, the vision for the project is good,” he said.

To read the full story from The Business Journal, click here. 

When you go to a playground, you often expect to see man-made material such as slides, swing sets and jungle gyms, but one citizen-driven organization is looking to give Youngstown more natural equipment. 21 News caught up with Mary Danus, a board member with the Youngstown Neighborhood Development Corporation (YNDC), who tells us a climbing tree will soon be making itself at home in a pocket park in the city's sixth ward.

Youngstown City Council has awarded YNDC $21,000 in ARP funds to purchase a sideways climbing tree for a pocket park on the 200 block of Clarencedale Avenue.

To read the full story from WFMJ, click here. 

City council agreed to replace the city hall fire escape at a cost of $1.1 million — a project that will take six more months to finish. “The time that this is taking so far is alarming because it’s the safety of it,” Councilwoman Samantha Turner, D-3rd Ward, said. Fire Chief Barry Finley ordered the fire escape closed March 9 after a Feb. 3 inspection determined it was inoperable. City officials initially decided to repair the fire escape at a cost of about $250,000. But Charles Shasho, deputy director of public works, said July 5 that the fire escape was in worse condition than anticipated, and it would be more effective in the long term to replace it.

Council voted 7-0 Monday to raise the amount to $1.1 million and have the board of control pay the lowest and best bidder for the replacement. Shasho said he expects to get proposals by Friday, with two companies already interested in doing the work. The repairs initially were to be finished by this month. But with the replacement, it will take another six months, Shasho said. The city already owes about $250,000 for cleaning and sandblasting the existing fire escape and for design work, he said. Repairing it would cost about $300,000 more so Shasho said he, Finley and Kevin Flinn, commissioner of buildings and grounds, recommended to Mayor Jamael Tito Brown that a replacement — at almost three times that price — would be better even though it would be more costly. “City hall’s not going anywhere,” Shasho said. “We’re going to be here in perpetuity practically.” He added: “It was probably best to go ahead and suck it up and replace the fire escape with a modern, galvanized-steel fire escape.” 

City officials announced March 9 that the fire escape would be shut down until work to it could be finished. Because it’s the only other way to get in and out of the building besides the stairwell in case of a fire, city council moved all of its meetings from the sixth floor, where it regularly holds them. The building’s two elevators automatically shut down when there’s a fire. The concern is too many people attend council meetings and it would be dangerous to have them in council chambers. All but two council meetings, including Monday’s, since then were moved to the Covelli Centre community room with finance committee meetings taking place before them. Council next meets Aug. 23, but a location hasn’t been determined. Other committee meetings and city bodies have met elsewhere in city hall, mostly in conference rooms on the second or fifth floors, or at the Eugenia Atkinson Recreation Center.The board of control has continued to meet on the sixth floor in the council caucus room.

ARP SPENDING
City council approved $321,000 in American Rescue Plan spending for a total of three projects, all sponsored by members of council. The money for the three requests would come from the $14 million in ARP funding — $2 million per ward — that council voted in April 2022 to give themselves. A number of council-sponsored ARP requests have met with resistance from Brown and Law Director Jeff Limbian who question if the proposals meet federal ARP requirements and the goals of what residents want from the city’s total $82,775,370 award. A little more than half of the $14 million council awarded itself has been approved by the legislative body. But less than half of that has been allocated by the board of control, consisting of Brown, Limbian and Finance Director Kyle Miasek. Instead of a Brown veto, the board of control has chosen not to put several of the council funding requests up for a vote. Turner on Monday asked Limbian and representatives for Brown and Miasek if they had sufficient information to approve the proposals and all said no.

Councilman Julius Oliver, D-1st Ward, sponsored spending $150,000 for the Western Reserve Port Authority to buy 64 Ridge Ave., a 73-year-old former medical building, to turn it into a community center and business incubator. Turner opposed the project and read a lengthy statement from James F. Bird, executive director of the Boys & Girls Clubs of Youngstown, in opposition to the project, stating there are already a number of existing buildings that could be used for the project. Oliver said Bird’s statement was “irrelevant” and pointed out that Turner serves on the club’s board of directors. Turner ended up abstaining from the vote. After the vote, Councilman Mike Ray, D-4th Ward, asked Limbian if a council member who also serves on a board — such as Turner with the Boys & Girls Clubs — should engage in discussions like the one Monday about Oliver’s project. Limbian said not participating in those discussions “would be a wise course of conduct, but we can’t unring the bell.”

The two other council-backed ARP projects approved Monday are:
•   Councilman Jimmy Hughes, D-2nd Ward, providing $150,000 to the Youngstown Neighborhood Development Corp. to conduct a ward-wide cleanup project “to eliminate blight and improve neighborhood conditions.”

To read the full story from The Vindicator, click here. 
 

As community engagement fellow for the Youngstown Neighborhood Development Corporation, Kayshia Washington said she goes door-to-door to conduct surveys about how residents feel about their neighborhood. After several visits, Washington was surprised to realize how few residents knew what resources were available to them in the community. 

To read the full story from The Business Journal click here.