July 29, 2004

Men’s Group to promote Yellow Springs’ good image

Momentum is an important part of any visioning and planning process, participants of last March’s Yellow Springs economic forum might agree. That’s one of the reasons that just four months after the forum, the Yellow Springs Men’s Group has begun work on one of the forum’s goals: to create for Yellow Springs a more positive image and to attract more businesses and residents to town.

Many forum participants felt that Yellow Springs has had difficulty attracting enough new residents and businesses because of what some people outside the village perceive as a community with a heavy tax burden, expensive housing, high utility costs and limited services, Men’s Group member Ron Schmidt said in a recent interview.

Men’s Group President Bill Alexander agrees. “The overall objective is to say to the public outside Yellow Springs that it exists and that there are good things about it,” he said.

The objective of the public information project, known as Balancing the Scales, is to balance the negative perceptions of the village by promoting the many positive aspects of living here. The village’s strength in education, its diversity and tolerance and its historical support of business incubation are positive things that have kept residents in town for many years, said Schmidt, who believes that promoting these attributes would help people see beyond a negative image.

“We’ve done the opposite for so long by putting up the gates, and look where we are,” Schmidt said. “The cost of living has gone up because the cost of services is being shared by fewer and fewer people.”

The Men’s Group created a rough plan of its objectives to increase visitation, attract new residents, strengthen local institutions and increase business development, which are goals based on concerns raised at the forum. The plan calls for a three-year effort, beginning with forging a steering committee of about seven experienced leaders from the community who will research information about the village and design a plan for choosing what information to distribute and how to distribute it.

The second phase involves hiring an individual or organization to produce and distribute information, and the third phase covers maintaining a formal system of public education through mailings, Web sites, receptions, tours and progress reports. If the project begins this month, as planned, Schmidt hopes the steering committee will have chosen a contractor with a plan in hand by the end of this coming December, he said.

According to Alexander, nearly 90 percent of the funds for the project’s first year have already been secured. The Dayton Foundation has pledged $14,000, and the Yellow Springs Community Foundation and the Antioch Company Foundation have each committed to gifts of $6,000. The local government’s budgeted share of $7,000 has been covered by the Village of Yellow Springs, Miami Township and possibly the Yellow Springs Board of Education. The only funder that has not decided yet is the local chamber of commerce, which has been asked to donate $3,000.

The Men’s Group estimates that the entire three-year effort will cost about $100,000. Getting support and input from all stakeholders is one of the main objectives in moving ahead with the effort, Schmidt said.

While the formal process is taking shape, Schmidt hopes that general ideas from the forum, such as the village’s strength in education, can be publicized.

“It seems to me that this would lay the groundwork for people’s understanding of what an education village is,” Schmidt said.

Village Council president Tony Arnett agreed that many forum participants voiced concern about the antibusiness image some people hold of Yellow Springs.

“If the perception is that we’ve done more to chase businesses out than encourage them to stay, that’s an image problem,” Arnett said. “Everyone in the forum’s economic focus group agreed that we had to do something about our image. It was just a matter of how.”

Part of the difficulty in attracting new business and residents to Yellow Springs is the limited amount of housing available in the village, he said. Real estate and development companies in the Dayton area don’t even think about coming to Yellow Springs because they view it as a closed market, a village that doesn’t want to grow.

“This image campaign is an important part of getting that perception turned around,” Arnett said.

Marianne MacQueen, who directs the nonprofit Home, Inc., acknowledges that the village should work on attracting businesses to town, but she cautioned villagers to think about how much growth they want and what they will have to give up to get it. Living in a small community allows for the face-to-face relationships that villagers value, said MacQueen, who believes that Yellow Springs’ uniquely diverse and tolerant character could change with too much uncontrolled growth.

The village should also focus its energy on supporting the businesses that already exist, such as Antioch College, which has contributed so much and for so long to make the village what it is, she said. Along with attracting businesses, she added, the village needs to encourage and facilitate a way for a critical mass of people to both live and work here so that villagers are truly invested in their community.

School board member Bill Firestone opposes spending school funds on the Men’s Group effort, but he views the idea of promoting the village to attract more businesses and residents as valuable, he said. There are those in the Miami Valley who view Yellow Springs negatively, he said, and presenting a positive view of the village to attract a broad spectrum of groups to town would be a good thing as long as it targets diversity.

“It concerns me that we would end up just building a bunch of big houses,” he said.

The concerns about the village’s image came out of a small focus group at the forum, and whether it’s a good idea or not, Firestone said, he would like to see more people involved in the discussion process.

The effort to promote Yellow Springs’ positive attributes runs parallel to other plans forum participants have to accomplish forum goals. Members of the Community Round Table were elected at the forum to continue planning the best way to foster an education village, support local businesses and attract new ones, solicit community input and distribute information to keep the focus on planning for the future a priority.

—Lauren Heaton