By Laura Wood, MEM ’17 and Program Specialist, Nicholas School of the Environment

I first traveled to Youngstown in October, 2017 to meet with a group of community leaders about a new green stormwater infrastructure (GSI) project. We were collaborating on a GSI community engagement and education campaign to help build awareness about how GSI could benefit Youngstown.

The city is under a consent decree with EPA, which required Youngstown to invest in a large scale solution to reduce stormwater pollution. Youngstown is one of 772 cities across the country struggling to manage aging and outdated wastewater infrastructure systems that combine stormwater runoff and sewage into one pipe. After heavy rainfall, these systems flood and discharge raw sewage into adjacent waterways.

In Youngstown, combined sewer overflows (CSOs) have forced the city’s popular Mill Creek Park, the second largest urban park in the country, to close recreational access to the park’s waterways. This closure joins an enduring landscape of shutdowns, unemployment, and social decline shaped by decades of deindustrialization. Youngstown residents continue to struggle with land vacancy, high concentrated poverty rates, poor health, and environmental pollution.

My work in Youngstown focused on laying the groundwork for the development of a community-driven GSI plan by facilitating and empowering a community leadership group. A growing body of research supports the critical roles that access to green space and contact with nature have in addressing public health concerns. The goal of the GSI plan was to help Youngstown meet its stormwater regulatory requirements under the EPA consent degree while creating infrastructure that maximizes benefits prioritized by the community. The community leadership group would guide planning efforts, help prioritize community health concerns, identify areas of flooding, and educate their peers. The GSI plan’s success hinged on building and maintaining trust.

Many Youngstown residents were, rightfully, skeptical of projects claiming to provide the solution to revitalizing their community; the population has endured over 40 years of economic and social setbacks. Over the course of six months, I collaborated with the leadership group to plan and facilitate eight community workshops, four large public events, and three radio features. I designed a project logo and launched an aggressive social media campaign. I traveled often to Youngstown, spent hours on the phone with community leaders, visited schools, and attended neighborhood association meetings. Ultimately, through the leadership of my community advocates, we engaged over 3,000 residents and secured a large investment from the city for GSI master plan development.

Green stormwater infrastructure demonstration project at Mill Creek Park, Youngstown, Ohio. Photo by Laura Wood.

The program is now being led by one of the community advocates and the GSI plan is still in development. While I am no longer involved in the project, I remain in touch with several residents I befriended in Youngstown. I admire the hard work my community team put into this project and I’m thankful for all they taught me about resilience, community pride, and teamwork. Building effective community partnerships is nuanced and subjective, but in my experience these four approaches helped my GSI project succeed.

  1. Engage with your community early and robustly. My colleagues had spent over two years engaging with Youngstown community leaders before we officially began the project. Connect with members of the community before you begin a project and engage those connections in the project design phase.
  2. Empower your partners. Your message will be stronger if it comes from someone within the community. When I led community workshops, my goal was to provide enough support to my community leaders so that they felt confident leading the group.
  3. Build your local network. Connecting with community members across organizations will provide you with a greater understanding of the community’s social/political landscape and demonstrate your commitment to the people your project will impact the most.
  4. Harness local knowledge. While you may be an expert in your project field, your local partners are experts in their community. Crowd sourcing data or incorporating a citizen science component into your project are two ways to gather information from the community.

The program is now being led by one of the community advocates and the GSI plan is still in development.

After writing this piece, I reached out to the current leader of our GSI team, Keland Logan, for a project update. Keland has always been a strong advocate for GSI in Youngstown. Last week, his recently-formed non-profit organization, The Colony Youngstown, which is dedicated to empowering local youth, collaborated with Youngstown high school students to install a rain garden. When I asked him if he was hopeful for the future of his GSI work, he said, “I have passed the point of hope. Green infrastructure now gives me purpose, direction, and value. Hope was last year. This is the future, a beautiful and sustainable future filled with opportunity.”

The author posing with her Youngstown green infrastructure community team colleagues. Photo by Laura Wood.