Elyria must explore new approaches

One of the challenges that the city of Elyria shares with many municipal governments are efforts to link the big vision of what’s possible to focused, on-the-ground practices, particularly in urban designated communities of our size — under 100,000 in population.

One way to do this is by working directly with anchor institutions, including hospitals and business stalwarts, colleges, community foundations, civic service organizations, and fellow local government entities to foster community wealth building.

The goal would be to work together to improve community well-being by building inclusive and sustainable local initiatives and collaborations.

Participating members would be encouraged and supported to work on developing plans to scale their approaches to the nuances and realities of our local communities. It is encouraging to know that there is work already happening.

Our community is blessed with a wealth of knowledge and commitment to excellence and creating transformative change.

Commitment to exploring new approaches has been growing, with more dedication in limited urban markets like Elyria, across the U.S.

The focused discussions go beyond beautification abstracts and event sponsorships to true community wealth building. The focus includes exploring how worker ownership, public/ private initiatives, cooperatives and even municipal ownership participation through investment corporations can help impact positive outcomes for sustainable growth and improvement.

Anchor coalitions and grassroots organizing can get excited and mobilized around efforts that stress inclusion, clarity, transparency, and disciplined approaches, rooted in efficacy, with benchmarks and meaningful measurables.

These are the effective tools of leadership, not cleverly disguised optics and misdirected pronouncements.

A close example can be viewed in the Evergreen Collaboratives in Cleveland. Ideastream has a couple of great articles on the efforts, including the following article with a video: www.ideastream.org/programs/ideas/worker-owned-co-opsblaze-a-trail-out-of-poverty

Although we know that there are no guarantees and business investment can often be efforts in futility, transformative change is possible and going on in other communities.

Why not our community? Elyria citizens must always demand that leadership put people over politics.

Marcus Madison Elyria Ward 5 city councilman